


All Helps and Advantages of War

by byzantienne, sunspeared



Series: Leviathanstuck [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Black Romance, F/M, Multi, Xeno
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-12-06
Updated: 2012-03-26
Packaged: 2017-10-26 23:43:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunspeared/pseuds/sunspeared
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The clutch of trolls subsides into an awkward silence, glancing back and forth between them. Eridan takes a step toward her, his hands half-raised from his side as if he’s prepared for violence, with the whole room watching.</i></p><p><i>Rose gives it to him first. </i></p><p>On the eve of Her Imperious Condescension's visit to the Ninth Hivefleet, Eridan Ampora tries to balance his career in the Alternian High Command and his loyalties to Feferi Peixes, while Rose Lalonde is drawn into a revolution -- and into reprising her role as emissary to the horrorterrors.</p><p>(Takes a left turn at end of Act Five, lands splat in the middle of a space opera.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In nearly every respect, this is [urbanAnchorite's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/t_ZM/pseuds/urbanAnchorite) fault. We blame her. She shipped it first. There's reason to suspect she's some kind of patient zero for Rose♠Eridan. Not that we _mind_.
> 
> There was a moment in which we could have just written the blackrom porn. But instead, this thing insisted on growing plot horrortendrils, and those are nigh-impossible to escape. (Stubborn throes.)
> 
> Extensive and heartfelt thanks to Gileonnen, Gatty, and Taz for beta services well-rendered.
> 
> Part one of three.

  
  
_And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war._   


Hobbes, _Leviathan_

  


  
**I.**   


Truly, Rose thinks, neither the slippery piles of alien canapes on skewers, nor the grating tones of the Alternian equivalent of a military brass quintet are the most egregious examples of poor taste in this ballroom. The entire party is swirling around what might charitably be described as a decorative motorcycle cage. Some of the higher-bloods are cooing at it and tapping the bars with their claws. It's empty at the moment, the promised entertainment as-yet unarrived, and all there is to do just before moonrise at the Ninth Hivefleet Conquering Day Celebratory Ball is to chatter inanely.

She's _bored._ She wishes she had a martini glass, and proceeds to regret wishing. She's tried the liquors, over the years -- all of the liquors, and not one of them has any effect on her body beyond, in one notable instance, a terrible case of the sneezes, and so she holds her glass loosely in one hand and ignores it.

Across the room, Dave hangs off of Terezi's arm and is inscrutable at a few bluebloods from behind his sunglasses while Terezi cackles at a joke one of them made (Rose knows the pitch of that screech by now: she's faking it). The sound carries across the room, over the mutters and music. Dave peels away from her, and Terezi pats his behind fondly as he goes. The shoulderclasps on her gown are giant, besequinned dragon's heads. Rose couldn't lose track of her even if she wanted to.

"Tough job," Dave says, once he's made his way across the room to her and settles against the wall, "someone's gotta do it." Rose opens her mouth to protest, and he talks over her -- "Yeah, don't even, you were watching. We're the only ones of us here."

But now there's _two_ of them, two humans, and they're getting stares from a group of tealbloods who had previously been occupied with gorging themselves on the horrible free hors d'oeuvres. "I thought the assgrab was a nice touch, brother dear."

More stares. They're a matching set. When Alternians do black tie, they do _black tie,_ the sort of black that sucks in all the light around it. She and Dave are cut from the same cloth this evening, without any class symbol or blood color worked cleverly into their formalwear. They don't need it.

If Rose squints, and tilts her head so the light hits Dave correctly, she can still see the echo of a giant gear, swooping around the blond tendrils of his hair like a particularly persistent halo. And besides, there are only four humans in the entire world. Even as nothing more than powerless, pink, naked mammals with teeth blunter than a grub's, they'd have been a curiosity.

On the other hand, the remnants of godhood have probably kept their merry band of postapocalyptic survivors on the side of the cage that has the open bar.

"No one can resist this ass, not even Miss Junior Legislascerator of the Year," Dave says, and Rose does not let even a bit of her amusement show, even at the corners of her mouth. He'd notice if she did.

"Why did we even come," she says.

"I'm the armcandy. Not sure what you're doing." Dave enjoys this, Rose is quite aware -- being dragged about on Terezi's leash, something for her to show off. Sometimes he even speaks, to the awe and delight of his observers.

"I'm here for the canapes," Rose says, picking one off of the tray of a passing maroonblood server. Well. Something very much like canapes. Canape-shaped. Canape-inspired. The maroonblood weaves through the room, the five platters floating around her an invitation for someone to attempt to shove one over. "And the entertainment."

That makes him wince. They're leading something into the ring as she says the words, something with only the dimmest spark of intelligence in its eyes. The trolls like their entertainments that way: bright enough to know that something terrible is happening, but not nearly clever enough to attempt to escape.

This evening's beast is a compact thing, only four feet tall, but hulking with whatever muscle-analogue it has under its tough skin and spare, bristly tufts of fur. Five legs arranged about a circular body, no discernible prehensile limbs -- some species of psionic that they'll pit a gutterblood against. She's seen enough of these to know.

She hates that she can think _gutterblood_ so easily, now.

Dave hangs back by the wall as Rose pushes through the crowd to get a better view of the ring. The trolls don't get out of her way; she's not John, the room refuses to reorient itself around her, whether or not she'd like to gorge herself sick on Alternian imperial entertainment. She pushes, and they allow her passage. It's not respect. Not quite.

The spots nearest the cage are a bristle of indigo and violetbloods, horns sharp enough to put her eyes out on if she ever feels like joining Terezi in the club of people who have to lick Dave to find out if he's smirking or merely having a bout of minor indigestion. Some of them are decked out in the red and white dress uniforms the military wears to these sort of things. They're dripping with epaulets and ceremonial swords, straight-backed and mostly taller than her, and one of them is Eridan Ampora.

So Dave was wrong. There is someone here they know. Not that Rose would have picked Eridan first from the limited palette of possibilities. She'd been under the impression that he was still off _conquerin the stars,_ or whatever he'd spouted when he'd finally managed to claw his way into the army.

 _Please, for the love of the sweet Mother Grub below_ – it's not her oath, it's not even her species, but seven years of acculturation would have taught anyone how to swear in Alternian -- _don't let him see me._ There's a _half-cape,_ for heaven's sake, thrown rakishly over one of Eridan's arms. In crushed velvet. It’s the same purple and gold as his Adjutant’s insignia pips. He's _accessorized._

Rose makes to edge around to the other side of a particularly large ceruleanblood, but it's too late. Eridan's already caught sight of her from the corner of his eye. He tosses his cape over his shoulder, elbows the greenblood next to him in the ribs to get him out of the way, and sidles up next to her, gill-slits flaring just enough to draw her attention to them. She wants nothing more than to clap her hands over them and see what it makes him do.

Instead: "Eridan," she says.

"Well, well," he begins, but sure enough, they're leading a dazed rustblood into the arena. The crowd cheers once with excitement, then dies down, goes silent in anticipation of the fight to come. Eridan has to stoop down to whisper in her ear to avoid breaking the perfect quiet. "Who invited you, Lalonde?"

"Half of troll society," she mutters back, aware of the eyes boring into their backs. "At last check. Is that a problem?"

"Other people's lack of taste ain't my problem," Eridan says. He drawls like the last scion of a Charleston tobacco magnate, except with a soupçon of hiss-spit and wavering Alternian consonants.

"You're the one who came over here," she says, stage-whispering in complete confidence. A forest of pronged ears are rotating toward her mouth right now, she's sure.

Eridan keeps his voice reprimandingly low. "What, I can't be nice? You're one of us."

In the cage, the alien chitters and the troll gladiator is covered from the nose down in a gush of red, like he's been punched without the benefit of hands.

"Am I," Rose says, quite out loud.

No one dares to hush her, not when she and Eridan are who they are. _This_ is the show. The ceruleanblood -- from the corner of her eyes, Rose can see that her rank insignia says something like _general_ \-- snickers.

Eridan rakes his eyes over her, curls his upper lip in a disparaging leer. His teeth are needles as big as thorns, and curve inward. Seadweller dentition. "Well look at you, gettin so forward," he says.

Rose resists the urge to curtsy sarcastically. "If you say 'nice dress,' Ampora, I will be forced to waste my breath laughing at you."

"Could use some color, actually, you look a bit a dead fish," he snips.

She turns to him, a fractional incline, enough to catch him straight-on in the eyes. She doesn’t even have to say anything, just hold his gaze and watch the color drain slowly out of his cheeks while he contemplates what he just said.

When he's gone a sicker grey than usual, she smiles and says, "Did that cape come with the uniform, or did you have to send away to the Third Fleet for the most ostentatious model?"

He inhales through his nose, a sharp little sniff. "You don't have any ground to stand on, tellin me what is and ain't appropriate for one of these parties."

In the ring, the rustblood goes limp while grappling with the beast, caught in a pair of its limbs like a sodden rag. The alien opens the front of its face, a gaping triangular maw, and tilts over the rustblood’s gut. Rose thinks of preying mantises, and braces herself. It doesn’t descend. It _keens,_ at a pitch that makes the trolls surrounding her wince. Trickles of pearly, iridescent blood ooze out of its sides, where the limbs connect. The rustblood’s face is contorted, straining with effort. Slowly, the alien’s bones ease their way out of its body, leaving a husk of skin and organs to slump inertly on the ground. The rustblood makes a choked, triumphant sound, a little better than a rattling cough.

She and Eridan are both holding their breaths, leaning forward at the same angle. It's disgustingly intimate. The audience applauds -- this is the most genteel troll society ever gets, little more than a polite round, like they're applauding a game of golf-- and then the music starts again and the room goes about its business. "See," Eridan says, releasing his grip on the cage's bars, "you liked it, that's why I'm sayin -- one of us."

"Ampora," Rose says, around the imagined taste of bile in the back of her throat, "if that was some sort of overture, I can't say the Imperial Service has improved your technique at all."

Completely oblivious, he says, "Wanna see what's improved, Lalonde?"

"Well. Your capacity for enjoying public slaughter hasn’t changed a bit."

"And that's the river callin the ocean wet, sweetheart." His pause is a touch too long to be accidental, but far too short to be dramatic. Low marks from the Russian judge. "Seer."

"Wholesale destruction was never within _my_ designated suite of powers." She smiles sweetly enough it aches her teeth. "Hope."

Eridan _touches her,_ puts his hand on her shoulder and gives a tiny squeeze, claws pricking at her bare flesh where the dress doesn’t cover. It doesn't hurt, but it _could._ "I'd let you call me _prince,_ how bout that. Your royal coddamn highness. Got that ring to it." She picks his hand off her by the wrist. His skin is clammy and chill, even farther away from human-normal than Terezi’s. He’s still talking. "Might be a mouthful, though, I dunno."

The way he's looking at her, it's like he expects her to cave in under the sheer mellifluous power of Eridan Ampora's shit-eating grin. He actually thinks this is working. Her shoulder prickles where he touched it, ghost imprints of disgust, and she can feel the eyes of at least a dozen other trolls, including the ceruleanblood general, staring at the two of them, greedy for whatever comes next. Her heart kicks up, her focus narrows. They are hanging on her every word, and she cannot believe how pathetic this _creature_ is.

"It isn’t as if I’d need to stretch my mouth to deal with anything _else_ of yours." Sweet as swallowing an entire spoonful of honey. She doesn't quite believe she’s said that in front of all these people and she's pleased, in a savage sort of way, that she’s managed. Dave would love it. Eridan snaps his jaw shut.

"Good evening. Adjutant," she says, and doesn’t bother with the expected courtesy of a bow, just turns on her heel and leaves him there.

This time, the crowd parts for her.

There’s only one person she could conceivably seek out just now, and he’s against the back wall where she left him, his lips a blank, closed line beneath the shades. Dave nods at her when she steps close, lets her come within a handsbreadth of the tightness in his shoulders. She shrugs, wordless.

He’s green as an apple. As green as Rose remembers apples being. "Fuck," he says, "it's like going to the opera."

"You've been to the _opera?"_

"Bro was -- he was a pit musician, for like a season, okay." Dave shoves a hand through his hair, casts about the crowd for Terezi. A few years ago, he would have said something about irony. "All that -- silent. Waiting. Fuck," he says again. Rose reaches up and fixes his hair _for_ him, just to feel him go still under her touch. There’s something in his loss of composure that sparks off an identical reaction in her. She can wade into a crowd of highbloods, all of whom would be glad to tear her to shreds were she not a bright toy for them to gawk at, but she can't handle Dave Strider panicking.

"I don't know how you get so close," Dave says.

Neither does Rose.

She takes his wrist -- maybe to press a kiss to it -- when Terezi appears at his other side, a vision of tesselated teal-and-scarlet dragonprint stockings under the outrageous cut of her gown, and pulls Dave down into a headlock. She comes up to approximately his shoulder. Rose grins helplessly and takes a step back.

"Dave," Terezi says, and in lieu of grinding her knuckles into his skull, she pets his hair. He couldn't get away if he wanted. "Dave, we are going back to my hive."

"TZ -- "

"Doctor's orders," Rose says, and Dave manages to shoot her a dirty look before Terezi drags him off. The two of them are a scandal. The _three_ of them are a scandal. Scandal, Terezi once explained to the two of them, is _good,_ scandal means people are looking at her, it can only help her career, and then she'd demanded that the two of them kiss. They had, of course. It wasn’t even the first time. Rose couldn't decide whether it had ruined the teaching moment, or -- as it were -- ended up hammering the point home. Helping them to understand the thrust of the argument. Driving it in.

But tonight it’s better for Terezi to deal with Dave alone. Once they're gone Rose looks around the room to find something horrible to eat. Something horrible on a stick. The party's organizers seem to have remembered the rustblood's existence; a greenblood attendant leads him from the cage, dazed and covered head to toe in viscous, pearly blood. He must have rolled in it at some point.

She has to insult three trolls away from her (all of them regular suitors, and not one of them sharp enough to catch her interest) on her way to the hors d'oeuvres, but before she reaches her destination, a burst of laughter at a joke she can't quite hear makes her flinch.

They're clustered around Eridan Ampora. They _orbit_ him, a few junior officers jostling for a better, nearer spot, the ceruleanblood she saw before smiling indulgently in his direction. The sight of him makes the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach worsen.

It’s an imp of the perverse that makes her walk right up to them.

"-- not to mention," Eridan is saying, "psionics are glubbin useful in a firefight if you stack em up, make a shield kind of."

"It’d take a whole lot of them," one of the other trolls says, shaking her head. Her horns are almost as large as Tavros's, vicious curving swoops. "That one almost got himself killed before he managed to take the whatsit apart."

Eridan nods appeasingly, and breezes forward. "That’s why you have a _bunch,_ have em keep the troops who can really shoot clear of distractions, land mines, whatever."

The general isn’t watching Eridan anymore, she’s watching Rose.

 _Oh lord,_ she thinks, and then also _why on earth not?_

"A waste of talented soldiers," she says, relishing the way every head turns, "using them as cannon fodder."

Eridan bares his teeth at her, a snarl of eel fangs. "And how would you know," he spits.

She could say something about carapaces. She could say something about being sent to one's inevitable death. As condescendingly as she can manage, she says, "Surely, they must be of some use in _deflecting_ the bullets."

"The Rose human is right," the general says. She doesn't raise her voice above the crowd, but they all hear her. Then she walks away, leaving Eridan gaping in her wake.

The clutch of trolls subsides into an awkward silence, glancing back and forth between them. Eridan takes a step toward her, his hands half-raised from his side as if he’s prepared for violence, with the whole room watching.

Rose gives it to him first.

She closes the space between them, forces her way past the reach of his claws and snarls her hands against the stiff fabric of his jacket. There’s a double row of buttons from his waist to his throat, polished to a dull shine. She walks her fingers up them, layer by layer. He actually shakes under her hands, an extended tremor that’s either fury or horror, and when she locks her fingertips into the tabbed collar at his throat and yanks him downward he bends like he’s brittle.

She doesn’t bother cutting her tongue on his teeth, just seizes his lower lip in hers and tears at the fragile skin on the inside. The sound he makes is surprise, low and liquid, and he curls a hand into one of the straps of her dress and separates them with a grunt. He has her pinned. She isn’t breathing.

"Scuse us," he says to the onlookers, and yes, of _course,_ decorum above all, she’s kissed Eridan Ampora and all he’s thinking of is his reputation. She’d roll her eyes but his mouth comes down on hers too fast. Bloodied, he tastes metallic-thick like milky chalk and spices, and his teeth are, if possible, worse than Terezi’s to navigate. It's the difference between shark and moray, Eridan is made for lurking in dark corners and tearing open what doesn’t belong to him --

But so is she, and she imagines filling his mouth up with the coiling tendrils of the Farthest Ring instead of her tongue and his blood.

When they break apart again his eyes are glazed for all of three seconds before he focuses on her face, as if it's the only thing in the world that matters, and seizes her upper arm to drag her away. He probably wants to go somewhere _private._ That won't do. Not at all. Rose digs her heels into the floor and slides her palms up his spine. The surrounding crowd has gone still, intent on them. Eridan stops trying to pull at her, but he’s got a full foot of height to use, leaning down and bending her back under the pressure of his hands. One of them curves around the back of her neck. He could snap it in an instant.

Instead, he breaks her skin with the points of his claws. A low hiss slides out of her along with her blood, five fine rivulets running down her nape and under her dress.

She's balanced on her heels, clinging to him; he could drop her to the floor at any moment, and they both know it.

 _Unacceptable,_ she thinks. She’s cold with -- not rage. Not for Eridan. Never for Eridan, he's not worth it, even if he's better at this than she could have anticipated. His long tongue slides against her palate. She traps it there with hers, scrapes it with teeth, distracts him while she gets one hand free, reaching up to his cheek in a parody of tenderness.

The gillflaps in front of his ears are a spongy cartilage that flutters against her palm, warmer than the rest of him. When she sinks her nails in the sound he makes is not unlike a human being kneed squarely in the balls.

He nearly _does_ drop her. She’s panting when she gets free of him, in time with the rapid hitches of his chest. It’s hard to drag her respiration back to her own rhythm. The blood running down the back of her neck snakes over her shoulder and pools in a smear along her clavicle. She licks her lips. Her pulse is somewhere low in her pelvis and she’s still disgusted.

"No," she says, "I don’t think so."

Eridan’s hand is pressed carefully to the side of his face where she clawed him. _"Rose,"_ he says.

The entertainment’s finished. The rest of the room can pretend not to be watching them now. Back to the cocktails.

"Good night, Ampora," she says. It's the second time she's bid him farewell this evening, and this time she does give him a bow -- him, and all those assembled -- before straightening her dress and gliding from the room, head swimming.

He doesn't follow her.

*

First thing when you swim into a seadweller's place is look _up,_ make sure they're not higher than your head, waiting to see if you've let your guard slip and they can snipe at you from above. Eridan's got that bit of tactics drilled so deep into his head that he checks automatically, even when all he's doing is stripping off his shirt and taking that first weightless step past the force-shield holding the water inside Feferi’s hivesuite.

Landdwellers never think to look up.

The water’s sweet, cool where it sluices through the gillslits on his ribs. Feferi’s filled the entire place up, all the way to the ceiling. Makes it good for pushing off of, getting the most speed in a surprise attack. She’s had to do that more often than Eridan would like. The rest of the suite's decorated in every color on the hemospectrum but her own, cuttlefish cages lining one whole wall. They'd cost her a fortune in feeding this far out in deep space, except the hiveship covers all her expenses and no one lets her pay for a damn thing when she goes anywhere. She's got the biggest suite in the very heart of the ship and they won't let her move into somewhere she feels less alone. Too much space, too little furniture.

Today, she's got her eyes closed on the chaise lounge stuck to the floor in the center of the room, her thick braid floating in the bubbles somewhere above her head, trident inches from her fingertips. She's not sleeping. She doesn't sleep enough.

His princess has gotten lean as a shark, corded muscle in her arms and through her shoulders, that trident carving her slowly through the months he doesn’t see her. Commandant Peixes, on the front line, yelling orders at the finest shock troops the Empire has to throw at its enemies. She’s different every time she comes back from a campaign, and Eridan wonders if she looks at him ever and sees the same changes, wonders the same at whether he’s still what she leaves on the deck of the hiveship.

He never asks.

Her eyes snap bright and open behind the goggles she has never gotten over, and she bounces off the chaise, tumbling in an effortless loop through the water to land neatly at his feet. She doesn’t come up to his chest.

"You're _late,"_ she sings, and for about two seconds it's like they're back in the oceans on Alternia, feeding her lusus everything they can kill. Then the smile fades from her face and she kicks off the floor a little, so she's hovering cross-legged at eye level with him.

"Yeah, well," he says, "troop review. Shiny landdwellers in shiny uniforms, ten thousand bilgewhiffers down, ten more to go."

Feferi barely even needs to move her arms to turn herself upside-down. He'd grab a fistful of her braid and tug it, to tease her for showing off, if it weren't for the frustrated line of bubbles she blows out of her mouth. "The march? The party?"

"Waste of time. They missed you, y'know."

She wrinkles her nose at him. "We’re not _bugged,_ I wouldn’t _ask_ if we were bugged, spit it out already."

"Revolutions are glubbin inconvenient for small talk," Eridan mutters, and then nods. "General Ismene took bets on that psionic fight everyone was gettin off on."

"And?"

"And," Eridan says. "And they were talkin about psionics in other hivefleets, is what the _and_ is, here."

 _That_ does it. That makes the hope bloom behind Feferi's eyes. But -- shit -- he's done so well, all day, not thinking about his little incident last night, his indiscreet run-in, they were calling it in the officers' lounge. Now he's got Rose's sneer right in the forefront his mind, that nasty little emphasis on _hope,_ and does his best to keep a calm face when he says, "Sollux Captor, Systems Infiltration Tech, Twenty-Seventh Hivefleet."

And just as easy as he's sown it, he uproots it. The Twenty-Seventh is all the way on the other end of the galaxy, in the farthest reaches of the most remote arm with the nastiest shit in it. There's an _alliance,_ a mothergrubbin consortium of races the Empire's been trying to crush for a good hundred sweeps now. He doesn't have to say it. Feferi rights herself and kicks away from him, doing a tight, angry little spiral up toward the ceiling.

"That’s all I know," he says. It’s even true, that’s all he knows about Sollux glubbin Captor and what’s become of him. Feferi makes a displeased little hiss of a sound, all air and ripples. He _waits_ for her while she hovers near the top of the hive, waits and stares at the cream-grey curve of her bare spine while she twists.

She comes down to him.

"So what else happened," she says, all wrapped up in cheer. _Hiding_ herself from him. "Tell me _everyfin._ I miss all the fun parties."

Eridan lets himself off the thin, strong layer of forcefield on the floor, hovering just a few clawsbreadths off the ground. "Like I said, General Ismene was taking bets," he says, "like a cashgrubbin greenblood, and Vimsha and Gezlan snuck off into a corner and did some fishy business" -- good, she smiles at the pun, it's terrible but she _smiles_ \-- "if you know what I mean, we were all pretendin not to watch, they're flushed out the horns for each other."

"I think you're leaving something out!" Feferi claps her hands together. The sound carries funny through water. Eridan's spent too much time on land, he's gotta get himself assigned to conquering some aquatic species, it'll do him an ocean of good. "I think you're leaving out something _reely_ important," she says.

"What, no," he says, "givin you everything I've got, Fef."

"Reely, reely, _reely_ important." She's got little remora everywhere on the ship, a bunch of suckerfish, trying to ride her fins to the top. He knows he's not the only one, or even the highest-placed. He can't even play dumb on this. "It starts with an _R,"_ she says, "and it ends with an -- "

He throws his hands up. "She started it, Fef!"

"I don't believe you for a second, Eridan!" She swims circles around him, and he finally gets kicking, moving up out of the loops she's making. It does about as much good as sticking his bulge in Ahab's Crosshairs and wiggling it around. "I think you _pricked_ \-- and _prodded_ \-- and _poked_ at her until she got mad! And _then_ she started it, isn't that right?" She punctuates every other word with a claw-jab to a different part of his body. "That's what they're saying, anyway."

"Sayin?"

Feferi pauses her circling. "Don't get _excited."_

"Are they sayin we're -- "

"Waxing black?"

"That one," Eridan says. Rose'd been as furious as any highblood, and if she'd been a troll he would've come out of it with his uniform shredded to bits, he bet, right in public. And he could've thrown her against a wall and started a _real_ fight. He'd had the delicate little bones of her neck in his grip, and how _easy_ it would've been, to break every last fuckin one of them. Like snapping a twig.

Feferi waves her hand in front of his face. "Hello," she says, stretching the word out impossibly long, until it's nothing more than bubbles coming out of her mouth,"I'm right here, Eridan, don't you want to know?"

He does his best not to sound desperate when he says, "Shore. All right." It comes out strangled. Feferi musses his hair, and that makes it worse, how he has to keep himself from straining toward her touch; this has got to be the first time she's laid a hand on him in years, and she acts like she doesn't know it.

"They say you were flirting, black flirting, and she embarrassed you in front of General Ismene," Feferi says, "they say that she left you. In the middle of the room. _Alone."_ That last in a horrified stage whisper, hands covering her mouth, eyes wide and horrified and, best of all, _mocking him_ behind her goggles.

"Set me back three glubbin months." Eridan blows some air out his gills. "I've been cultivatin her. Gettin her all primed up." At the look on her face, he says, "Not like that, Fef, I want her job, not her pretty blue nook, can't be Adjutant Ampora forever, you know."

Feferi floats on her back and contemplates the artificial moonglow from the ceiling. "General Ampora," she says, suddenly solemn. When she gets quiet like this -- it’s like having his Empress call him what he is. What he’ll be.

"Got a ring to it, is what it's got," he says.

When she nods at him, smiling, he thinks that he’s got to tell her the last bit of intel he’s saved up, scraps of heavy-coded conversation he’s sucked up at Ismene’s side over the past quarter-sweep. He wasn’t going to deliver until he had something concrete -- besides, the Sollux bomb is enough to drop on her -- but, "Fef," he says, getting himself down to the floor, not even ashamed that he needs something solid under his feet for this one. "Fef, the Condesce is coming. Here."

"Soon," Feferi says, so soft he can barely hear it through the water. Like she already knows. And she didn't tell him. "Eridan, we're not moving fast enough."

He'd ask whether it's about Sollux, or about her rebellion, but he knows it's the first one, it's always Sollux with her. "What're we going to do?" What can _he_ do for _her,_ how can he serve, on which square of the board will he do the most damage in her hands. It’s all he’s ever wanted. Sometimes he even believes himself.

She paces the room in her most furious breaststroke for a long, long time, then flips backward and lands before him. "We can't go through the normal channels," she says. _Commandant Peixes_ says. He's looking at a whole other troll now. "We have to -- circumvent! We have to be _creative._ We," she says, "are going to the Legislacerators. And who's the best legislacerator we know, Adjutant Ampora? Who's our rising starfish?"

Eridan stares at her. "I am _not,"_ he says. "I am not asking Pyrope for any glubbin thing."

"Oh yes you _are,"_ Feferi tells him, smiling like moonrise.

And so he is.

*

Rose walks back from the hiveship’s university in the artificial twilight of Corridor 72 starboard, tealblood deck. She’s smuggled half a dozen books out of the university library, buried deep in her sylladex. The fetch modus she’s using is arcane, quite possibly illegal, and nigh-impossible for the guards to search.

She's always found small defiances far too satisfying.

The corridor is broad as a street, and as full of people. They give her far fewer predatory glances than they once did. Terezi’s particular brand of patronage is helpful, of course, but in truth no one has hassled Rose with more than casual intent since she left an overbearing blueblood bruised and half-unconscious in the middle of the street, reaching out with a handful of horrortendrils and the Light’s preternatural knowledge of just where to hit first.

 _When in Rome,_ she thinks.

The AI in the corridor's weather simulator is feeling benign today, and if she ignores the metal walls and the artificial holo-moon hanging above her, she can pretend that it's a pleasant summer night. When that changes, Rose notices on the faces of the crowd first.

They _quiet,_ the seething lot of them, tealbloods and greenbloods and lower castes, they all hush themselves like they’re battening down for a hurricane. Rose wants to look over her shoulder, imagines a hulking horrorterror there, creeping out at last to claim what belongs to it. She keeps her eyes straight ahead. She’s been here too long to ever willfully act like prey.

Nothing is different. Nothing is different except that each of the tiny red tridents worked into the metal of the hiveship, on the streetlights and the doorposts and the things that would be park benches if she was on Earth, every single one of them has gone from look-here scarlet to a blazing tyrian purple.

 _Feferi,_ Rose thinks.

A breathless heartbeat later, she adjusts. _Her Imperious Condescension._

For the first time since she arrived on the Ninth Hiveship, no one is looking at her. The crowd begins moving again, almost reluctantly, clumps and masses of trolls huddled together with those of their caste, as if they're waiting to be counted.

The class symbol over Terezi’s door has never looked more like home. The sensors in the archway recognize Rose’s living genetic code and open for her immediately; it's all she can do not to slump against the door once it's closed and triple-sealed behind her.

Dave and Terezi are resting, _canoodling,_ on the couch, in blissful ignorance of the -- the changeover, even though the trident worked into the ventilation duct over their heads has gone purple as well. But they're safe. They're sound. Terezi has her face pressed into Dave's neck, whispering horrible troll nothings into his ear.

She clears her throat, and they both glance over. Terezi must have pushed Dave's sunglasses up at some point, because he's wearing them like a headband, and his pale blond hair tufts over them.

"Look up," Rose says.

Terezi sees it first, and goes exactly as still as all of the trolls in the corridor. Rose doesn't miss the way Dave's arms tighten around her. "What is it?" he asks, squinting at the ceiling.

"The Condesce," Terezi says. Her eyes look straight through Rose, blank and far-seeing. "Her Imperious Condescension has deigned to pay a visit to the Ninth Hiveship." She says it _hollow,_ ritual words, weighted down with the sound of oracle-bones and flipped coins, and Rose shudders a little with sympathetic tremor.

Then Terezi’s bony fingers are snagging her hipbone, curling around to grab a handful of her ass. Rose yelps when she yanks, and tumbles overbalanced into the middle of them. Dave makes a surprised _oomph_ and proceeds to cooperate with Terezi, wrapping an arm around Rose’s ribs and preventing her from getting away.

He’s warm, and human. Rose presses her forehead into his shoulder.

"So it's bad news bears," Dave says, over her head, to Terezi. "I mean, fuck, Rose, what do you call a bear in Alternian, help me out here -- "

"Everyone in the corridor _stopped."_ Rose feels Terezi rub her back, the claws digging in enough to feel good through the pale grey twill of her blazer, but not hard enough to shred it. Or make her bleed. Her hair is long enough now to cover the scabs from where Eridan tore into her a few days ago. She's been waiting for one of them to bring it up, they can't not have heard. "And, Dave -- honeysucker growlbeast, any wiggler knows that. Terezi, lower."

Terezi snickers and moves up instead, between her shoulderblades. Dave goes on, "And it's so bad you have to break out the seervoice, TZ?" Terezi knees him in the side.

"An interstellar butcher," Rose says, "going boldly where no mass murderer has gone before, seeking out new races for her people to subjugate in more and more interesting ways."

"Oh, there's that." If the liquor here had any effect on them at all, Dave would be swirling his troll gin and tonic in its glass and staring soberly into the ice cubes. "I don't know about you, but _I'm_ not worried."

"Why on Earth would anyone be worried? Gosh. That’d be silly." She doesn't realize that she's said _Earth_ until Dave doesn’t have some reply immediately to hand.

Rose should be more careful. The negation of everything in the universe they came from sneaks up on all four of them unawares, but worst for Dave. If Rose regrets anything -- and she has a _list,_ numbered and kept, beginning with _I killed two universes by trusting a man who spoke in whitetext_ \-- it’s that when she convinced the ragged band of them to choose Alternia, not Earth, at the end of all things, she didn’t think of what it’d do to her brother. Her other half, her inverse twin. She ought to have known.

She swallows. Dave’s eyes are steady on hers. He forgives her everything.

Terezi waves her fingers in front of Rose’s face. "You're _staring_ at each other."

Lazily, Dave leans forward and bites Terezi’s knuckle. She shrieks, and Rose is suddenly surrounded by a flailing mess of sharp troll joints and squirming warm human. When they subside, Terezi is sprawled across both of their laps and Rose is leaning against Dave’s arm, half-collapsed.

"The Empress," says Terezi, as if she hadn’t spent the past five minutes engaged in a violent tickle-fight, "is coming to see Miss Raspberry Seashell Revolution, of course."

Rose considers restarting the tickling. It's safer than this conversation, even with Terezi’s razor-claws curled into her sides. While she’s debating, Dave asks, "What's she up to now?"

"That doesn’t matter," Terezi tells them. "She’s the Condesce’s successor. The Heiress. The only other tyrianblood in _all of the universe."_ She hooks a finger into Dave’s collar and pulls him down so that he’s looking right into the dull red of her eyes. Upside-down, Rose thinks, Terezi’s smile looks like an entire knifeblock. "The Empress is going to take her measure and see if she’s _wanting._ And if she is, then maybe --"

She draws one clawtip across her own throat, slow and almost lascivious. Rose watches the line of Dave’s adam’s apple shift as he swallows.

"She kills her successors," Rose says.

"Or they kill her! It’s perfectly legal," Terezi goes on. "We can’t have an Empress who isn’t worthy of the title. Just like the wriggling caverns, except on a multiplanetary scale."

"How many empresses have there been," says Dave.

Terezi shrugs. It makes Rose want to smooth her hands over the narrowness of her shoulders. "Just one."

"Thought so," he says. He extracts himself from the pile, leaving Terezi half on the couch cushions and half on Rose, her bony ass digging into Rose’s thighs. She makes a noise like a disturbed kitten crossed with a hyena. It’s _cute._

Dave looks down at them, one eyebrow quirked. "We should eat."

Rose slides a hand up Terezi’s side, under her shirt. "Your turn to cook, brother dear."

With a look that says he's swallowing a remark about _ectoincestuous lovepile rumpuses_ or _Christ Rose way to kill my boner,_ he wanders off, leaving the two of them alone. Terezi sits up, troll-fast and fluid, and sprawls against Rose’s chest, like a cat curling up on a radiator. Rose is a little surprised. Without Dave between them, she and Terezi are less easy. _Tentative,_ Rose thinks. _Issues with intimacy._ She’d laugh.

One of Terezi's hands travels up the side of of Rose's neck, and curls around the back of her skull.

"My, Miss Lalonde," she says, courtroom voice pitched low enough not to carry into the next room. Her claws hover over the exact points where Eridan cut her, pricking but not re-opening the scabs. "How did you get _these?"_

"Objection, your honor," Rose says, and this close her heartbeat must sound like a choir of jackhammers to Terezi's ears. "Badgering the witness." There's no such thing, in Alternian law. Rose has had to explain the concept at least three times.

"Overruled."

 _"Hearsay."_

"Miss Lalonde, you're reaching." Terezi drums her fingers on Rose's skin. "Overruled! We have witness testimony placing you at the scene. And we the court," she says, "question your _taste."_

"Me too," Dave says from the kitchen, over the sound of running water. Rose gets out the first syllable of a retort before Terezi smothers her mouth with a kiss. It's messy and long and ends with Terezi pulling away first, knee between Rose's thighs. Rose strains up embarrassingly after her. Terezi scrapes the tip of one claw over a scab, tracing the bump. It doesn't hurt, not really.

They lay like that for a while, breathing together, while Dave makes too much noise with the pots and pans. "He's terrible," Rose says, "you should have heard his overtures -- "

 _"Everyone_ heard them," Terezi interrupts her, and Rose’s cheeks go hot.

"Ampora is pathetic," she says, spitting out each word precisely, "and not in any way I _pity."_

Terezi laughs at her. "When did I say anything about pity?"

Rose doesn’t dignify that with a response.

"Do you _hate_ him, Rose?" Terezi hums in her ear. "Do you shrivel inside when he comes into the room, do you want to tear him up, get your pretty clawless fingers all covered in violet, make him _cringe_ for you --"

Rose chokes on the air.

"Hey Dave!" Terezi says cheerfully. "You win the bet!"

"Fuck yes," he says from the doorway, spoon in hand. He licks the back of it, and Rose doesn't have it in her to wonder how long he's been watching. "Told you so, TZ."

"What. Bet," Rose says.

Terezi’s grin peels her face open. "He bet me that I could make you admit that you’re waxing so black for _Eridan Ampora_ that you can’t see straight."

"Love is blind," says Dave.

Terezi wags a finger at him. _"Loathe_ is blind."

"That," Rose says, "was terrible. That was a travesty, and you should both be ashamed of yourselves. You _rehearsed_ that, didn't you."

Terezi unbuttons Rose’s pants. "Twice," she says. "In front of a mirror."

Rose tips her head back onto the couch and settles a hand in Terezi’s hair. Above them, the trident on the ventilation duct pulses tyrian, slowly.

She shuts her eyes.

*

It's an important job, Eridan tells himself, checking his profile in the mirror one last time. Feferi's got her fingers in a hundred pies he knows about and a hundred pies he doesn't and probably a few more he doesn't even want to think of, and she's chosen him to take care of this for her. To take care of getting Sollux back.

He keeps on telling himself that all the way out to Corridor 76 Port, where the mid-bloods go to eat. They've got real restaurants and cafés, not canteens. He's been having Terezi followed for the last two weeks, and counts it as a big fat success that only two of his people have been found mangled in conspicuous locations while finding out what places she frequents, and when.

He's not expecting 76 Port to be as dingy as it is, or maybe it's just the flickering holomoon they've got out here, he can't tell. It's mostly quiet this early in the night, save a few young green- and goldbloods, military, stumbling back from a hangover breakfast at some local greasy spoon. They see him in the full uniform of an officer at High Command, space-swallowing black with just the faintest violet piping at the collar and shoulders to show off his hemocaste and the Adjutant's rank-pips on each arm above the patches with his class symbol -- they see him, and they straighten up immediately. Hissing at them's unnecessary, but he can at least spare a good old-fashioned raised eyebrow. The smallest one squeaks a little when they rush past. Eridan squares his shoulders and grins at the entire world.

His intelligence says that Neophyte Pyrope gets her coffee (black, strong enough to kill two herds of tuskbeasts) first thing in the evening at the Supersaturated Caffeine Solution -- the greenbloods who frequent it call it the Super -- and stays there with a stack of lawbooks until just before the second artificial moonrise. Not going to be a Junior Legislascerator long, that one, the last of his pilot fish had said. Considering he'd been clutching a dragonhead-cane-shaped lump on the side of his skull at the time, Eridan's inclined to believe him.

He shoves the door of the Super open with a flourish and casts around.

She's there, all right. That teal and scarlet's visible from glubbin _space._

What Eridan hadn't counted on is her bringing her humans. Both of them, Complete Doucheprick of Time and Conniving Landhag of Light, one for each side. It's ostentatious, is what it is. Downright excessive.

Lalonde is the last person on the entire mothergrubbing hiveship that Eridan wants present for delicate negotiations on behalf of his princess for the safety of their comrade. Lalonde shouldn't be near a thing that requires any kind of deft hand, she's ruined Eridan's whole week, everyone at High Command keeps asking him about her, all sly, like he's got something to hide.

He could come back later, maybe.

Pyrope raises her head from the book she's slobbering on and points right at him. _Shit._ So he crosses the cafe, sits down at their table, makes himself at home. Lalonde's reading some kind of statistical manual. She moistens the very tip of one finger to turn the page and ignores him, magnificently. Fuckin art, ignoring people like that.

"I smelled you from two decks away," Pyrope says. "Were you even trying, Adjutant? I'm insulted." And _there's_ the smile they talk about, when High Command gossips about the cream of the young Legislacerator crop, that grin that'd be bowel-loosening if he hadn't been sawed in half and lived to tell about it.

Still, Eridan doesn't so much as glance at her staff of office. Sharp on the dragon's head, sharp at the end, and she'd be perfectly justified -- legally justified -- in stabbing him in public, right here and now, for what he's about to do. "Better me havin you followed than someone else, Neophyte."

With a tiny snigger, Strider goes back to typing at his husktop; Lalonde turns another page. And another. Not actually reading. And not what he's here for.

"Are you trying to intimidate me? A member of the Cruellest Bar?" Pyrope asks, and covers her mouth with the back of her hand. Perfect little _o_ of shock. "Why, that's -- that's illegal, Adjutant Ampora. That is _criminal."_

"Whoever said anything about intimidation?" He kicks back in his chair like he's ready to put his feet up on the table, then thinks better of it. "Maybe I've got a favor I wanna ask."

Pyrope looks him over like she's measuring him for a noose.

"The law does not bend," she says, and before she can go on, Dave outright snorts. She elbows him, then takes a delicate sip of coffee like he didn't just ruin the whole _living body of the law, inseparable and indistinguishable_ speech Eridan's heard about a million times from a million legislacerators, like she meant him to interrupt the entire time.

Rose sees fit to look up from her book, gives Eridan a cursory once-over from under her eyelashes. "Some of us, Ampora," she says, "are trying to get work done. Do you have anything you actually want to say, or are you just here to show off what little awareness of your own legal system that uniform has provided you?"

He could kill her. Reach right over the table and rip her speakstrings out of her throat. Serve her right.

"Neophyte Pyrope," he says, not even looking at Rose, see how she likes it, "I got somethin for you, a proposition, from a certain heiress we both know, somethin she really wants you to hear, if you know what I mean --"

Terezi makes a quizzical face, twists her mouth up into a nasty questionmark, and then Lalonde's got one of those knitting needle wands, those _Thorns,_ pointed right at him across the table. He isn't even sure when she pulled it out of her bag. Humans aren't supposed to be that fast. He freezes.

"Shut your alimentary hole, as one of our old friends would say," she says sweetly, "and look at the color of the tridents over the doors."

"What're you talkin about, _Rose,_ I know about that already --"

"And you still thought that this would be a good conversation to have in the middle of a _café?"_

No. He wouldn't tear out her throat. Better to make her hurt, first, snap her stupid grimdark fakewitch wand and break every bone in those narrow pale hands and wrists, remind her that she's nothing but jumped-up prey.

"I don't think you understand," he tells her, leaning in and baring his teeth when he smiles, "that I might just have somethin of actual importance to tell you. Somethin time-sensitive."

It's like she's caught, like he's pulling her in, that wand comes up off the table and nearly touches the fabric of his uniform, right over his heart. "If it's so time-sensitive, perhaps you ought to have avoided the four days of stalking Terezi like a particularly maladroit barkbeast."

"Two weeks," he finds himself saying, "two whole weeks, and you didn't notice a glubbin thing, did you?"

When she flushes, her cheeks go pink. He wonders if her skin is hot there, hotter than a lowblood's, all that red under the surface that shows up looking almost like she's got proper blood, higher than _his._

"Hey," Strider says, in a stage whisper that carries through the whole cafe, "we're still here. Right here. Y'know, in case you'd forgotten, you guys -- "

"Dave, they were _busy,_ be considerate," says Pyrope. She's all but rubbing her hands together, watching the two of them.

The rest of the place is watching them, too. Watching some drydocked dirty tealblood landdweller refuse to listen to him -- and staring at all four of them, four outta sixteen all in one place.

Well, if everybody wants a show, he'll give them one, _another_ one, he and Lalonde can take this act on the road. He grabs the hand holding the wand by her wrist. The bones shift, delicately, under the pressure of his fingers and she tries to pull free but he crushes her palm to his chest, Thorn and everything, right above his heart. She's half over the table, livid.

If he's wrong, if she blows a hole through him, he's not gonna rise up from the grave --

\-- she doesn't. She meets him halfway and her pathetic teeth click against his in a way that almost makes him recoil. Her free hand fists in the material of his uniform, trying to keeping him right where he is. Not this time, though, he's stronger in all the ways that matter, and he pushes her away, sets her back down into her chair and wipes his lips with the back of his hand. See how she likes being left in the middle of the room, all dazed and panting.

 _"Whatever,_ Lalonde," he says, and turns on his heel.

The door of the Super doesn't quite slam hard enough behind him, but it'll glubbing _do._

*

"Nice," Dave says.

Every single troll is staring at them, staring at her, dropped like so much trash while Eridan had the gall to swagger out, back to High Command, like he'd won something. Her mouth stings. Her hands are clutched so hard around the Thorns that her knuckles ache and there's a dull burn in her cheeks that she's ashamed of.

He'd treated her like a puppet, used her to salvage his own error. If even one of those staring eyes remembers Adjutant Ampora in this cafe, it'll be because he was playing with Rose Lalonde.

The worst part is -- it was _clever._

"Not very," says Rose, and clamps down on babbling the rest. She sets the Thorn down, very deliberately, and turns the page in her statistics text. The Alternian is meaningless symbols on the paper and she can't even pretend to concentrate. When she shuts the cover, the slap of page on page is too loud. Terezi nods at her, packing up her own enormous pile of books; Dave follows suit with his husktop. Terezi doesn't look angry. She also doesn't look half as amused as she had a few minutes ago, and when she leads the three of them out of the café Dave puts his arm around Rose's shoulders, awkward with his computer bag between them.

Rose slides her own hand into the small of his back, under the tails of his suit-jacket, the fabric a rich slide against her knuckles, solid red so dark it's almost indistinguishable from black. Terezi paces a half-meter ahead of them, rapid furious steps down the avenue. They only stop at the intersect of the next corridor-street, a four-way branch. The mid-evening light is ruined by the fact that the holomoon on this deck hasn't been fixed for the last perigee, no matter who pulls what strings where. It flickers and gutters and twitches over their heads.

Dave slips free of her, catches both of Terezi's shoulders in his hands and spins her like she's a dancer. "You kids have fun," he says, pulling up his sleeve to check an imaginary watch. He hasn't needed a real one since the game chewed them up and spat them out. "Places to be, batshit politics to avoid, beats to drop."

Terezi goes up on tiptoe to lick an outrageously sloppy kiss across his cheek. It gets her dipped backward for her trouble, suspended nearly off the ground in Dave's hands, and it isn't until she laughs that he lets her go, satisfied. He comes to Rose, afterward, and she makes as much of a fuss over straightening the lapels on his jacket as he'll let her.

It is far easier than explaining herself, just at this moment.

When he's out of sight, Terezi closes her claws around Rose's wrist, a stable loop, and drags her to the left, down a deck and across three more corridors before the wide entrance to 75 Port Arboreal Park yawns open and engulfs the both of them in _forest._ Something teratogenically large roars in the distance, but it's mercifully far away. Rose is hardly in the mood for recreational decimation of imported Alternian monstrosities.

Her own personal monster perches on the upthrust root of a tree, elbows propped on sharp knees. She doesn't frown so much as contemplatively gnaw at the corner of her mouth. Rose sits next to her, on the ground. The artificial leaf mulch will cling to her skirt. It's _quiet._ There aren't even footfalls that don't belong to the two of them.

"Is this the point at which you reprimand me," she asks.

Terezi shoves the high heel of her boot into Rose's shoulder, and Rose lets herself lean into it.

"I would like to shove all his insignia up his nook," Terezi tells her, conspiratorially soft, "every last decoration and medal. But you want to do it _worse."_

Rose would put her head in her hands, but it would be tantamount to surrender. "What did he think he was going to accomplish with that cheap stunt," she says. All that gets her is a snort from Terezi, a distressingly human-sounding one. Which is -- fair enough. She's not fooling either of them.

"What did he want from _us,"_ Terezi muses. "Eridan Ampora, on a mission from the Heiress."

Someone's carved a trident into the treetrunk over Terezi's head, and it pulses Tyrian purple just like every other one on the ship. It feels like bad luck to say _Feferi_ aloud. "I don't know what made her think he would be a good messenger boy," Rose says.

"Sensitive business."

"My point stands."

"So sensitive" -- Terezi hops off of the root and stands over Rose, so that Rose has to look _up_ \-- "that she couldn't trust it to a subordinate, of which she has many! At least two dozen, all of whom would have been far better choices."

Rose stands and lets Terezi brush the dirt from her backside. "Her Imperious Condescension is orbiting us as we speak," she says. The trident on the bark above Terezi glows, and she is only imagining that it's brighter now that she's said the Empress's name aloud.

Terezi nods, a bare-toothed smile in the gathering dark. "Even if Commandant Peixes wants to talk to me," she says, "Adjutant Ampora ruins my studying! I had an entire cup of coffee, Rose. I had just refilled it! I was reading about the execution protocols for the Subjuggulators during the Second Hivefleet Insurrection --"

"Should we have left you alone with that?" Rose manages. "All those _hangings,_ Terezi."

Terezi laughs at her, a vicious little hiss. "He thinks it's FLARP. Like he's Imperial Archagent Orphaner Dualscar and I'm _five sweeps old!"_

"That isn't it; he's not an idiot," and oh, lord, she is _explaining_ Eridan, laying his psychology out on the table for Terezi to pick over, and it gives her a perverse sense of satisfaction, "he's _arrogant._ He wouldn't come slinking to your doorstep like a petitioner; it's beneath his dignity. The only thing he knows how to do is draw attention to himself."

Instead of appreciation of her analysis, she gets Terezi's hands firmly grabbing her ass where the leaf mulch had been. _"You_ go find him," Terezi says. "Find out what he wants! I'll let you."

The idea of making Eridan tell her exactly what he'd _meant to accomplish_ makes her stomach flip in a nauseating little thrill. "In your infinite generosity," she says.

"Oh, yes. _That."_ That smile still makes the hair rise on the back of Rose's neck. "And -- I can't be seen walking into his office."

"But I can burst in?"

"Whenever you like," Terezi says. "They'll give you directions, and carry you there on their shoulders, and sell tickets, for good measure."

"I'll be sure to ask for a percentage of the concessions."

"And when you get there -- once you've unstuck your faces! -- you tell him that if it's about the sixteen of us, I'll listen, but I'm not one of his _subordinates."_

"You're the law," Rose says. Fondness, even after years of it, surprises her sometimes. She lifts one hand and pats the sleek bob of Terezi's hair.

Terezi tilts her head up at her. The red lenses in her glasses glitter in the dimness. "Yes," she says. "I suppose I am."


	2. Chapter 2

**II.**

Their shitty little office has a magnificent view of a military transport's fat rear end today, which is fine, because it's Eridan's turn to face away from the window. His and his co-adjutants' desks are always in a triangle: no one's got anyone's back, and no one's back is to the door. The three of them are supposed to be re-routing a whole quadrant's worth of flight patterns around the hiveship for Her Imperious Condescension's visit.

His co-adjutants have been fucking around on Trollian for the past hour or so. Eridan's ignoring their little office romance out of honest common decency, and also because he 's too noble to give a salt-rimmed shit. Or to be seen giving one.

"Got a good one here," he says, over Sellia Gezlan's furious typing. She's on the blue end of indigo, the end that doesn't draw seadwelling lusii like buzzbugs to a corpse. "Interfleet freighter, gonna be in orbit around the hiveship, says all her greenbloods are climbin the glubbin walls."

Mhetis Vimsha -- tealblood, nearly cerulean, pretty little spiral horns -- says, "I have a shipload of psionics, worried about the Helmsman's interference."

"Helmsman's a myth," Gezlan mutters, pulling a few papers out of the tidy stack on her desk. Vimsha's been straightening them for her every evening for the last half-sweep, only to have Gezlan disarrange the whole pile again by sunrise. "I've got -- seadweller captains arguing about precedence in the procession, how's that for bullshit."

 _"I've_ had a 'teleosTeiidae' trolling me." Vimsha glances across the tank at Eridan and raises her eyebrows, like she thinks there's something wrong with all seadwellers and it's his job to explain it just 'cause he's got _fins_ \-- if only she could get her hands on him, peel all his skin and scales back, and see how he works. He rolls his eyes at her and she goes back to fawning at Gezlan. "Is that one of them, Sellia? TT?"

Gezlan walks over to her desk with the paper and their horns brush, Vimsha's scraping along Gezlan's long, swooping lines. Eridan tries as hard as he can to stare at the star-quadrant map on his husktop screen instead of the flush-show. This all's cadet work, and he wouldn't care if it weren't distracting him from doing what he _really_ needs to be doing, which is dragging Sollux Captor's bifurcated ass back to safe harbor.

"Served under TT," he says, before his co-Adjutants can get too wrapped up in each other, and before he can get himself just as wrapped in thinking about what Her Imperious Condescension is here to do. "Right after academy, she's a prick."

"I'll put her at the back of the line," Vimsha says, and even if he doubts she'll actually do it, the _gesture's_ important. Vimsha gets gesture.

Eridan nods at her, just enough to acknowledge the favor. "Piss her off, not seein the Condesce up close."

"Piss anyone off," Gezlan says. "You going to the parade, Ampora?"

"You think I'd do all this rearrangin of starships and not go see the thing I'm arrangin them for?" Eridan says. "Front and center, middle of deck 1, close as I can get." He will, too. He'll go, even if the idea of being close enough to the Empress for her to look at him, see his princess in the backs of his eyes, makes him feel ill. Gezlan and Vimsha treat this whole thing like a lark, a nice vacation from strategy meetings and planning the general's supply-lines across parsecs of space. They don't know a _thing._

He moves one of the squadrons of fighter ships, the little pilot-and-gunner two-man ones, inscribes a new flight path for it. The lead ship is Vriska Serket's _Windfucker,_ which isn't even a real fighter at this point after all the shit she's done to it. It shouldn't even be in the coddamn parade, but John Egbert probably walked into whoever put together the formation's office and left with his moirail's ship up at the front of it. Eridan rolls his eyes and adds in extra loop-the-loops, just to be a pain in her ass.

He's just finished finalizing the flight plan and submitting it for approval when the door to their fishtank goes transparent and parts diagonally with a queasy-sounding _woosh._ It's too early for General Ismene's visit, she's not scheduled to come in and loom over them until after lunch.

"Excuse me," Rose Lalonde says, stepping into the office and deliberately glancing at everything but Eridan. He knows when someone's looking _through_ him. He's not nauseated anymore, he's furious, and it feels better than he wants it to. "Have you seen Adjutant Amp -- there he is." Only then does she meet his eyes. "I'm going to steal him from you, Adjutant Gezlan, Adjutant Vimsha."

"We'll cover for you, Ampora," Vimsha says. She'd been right there at the party, front row seats to the entertainment. (It's all entertainment to Mhetis Vimsha.) "Don't you worry, our general won't know a thing."

Rose is smirking at them and they're smirking right back. He's gotta get her out of here before they start liking each other, start glubbin _colluding._

He makes a big show of arranging all his papers into Vimsha-neat stacks, locking his husktop. For good measure, he grabs his half-cape off the coatrack where it's been sitting since the Conquering Day party and sweeps it over his shoulder once he's out in the middle of the corridor, so the embroidery catches the light and Rose's eye. Especially Rose's eye.

"What," he says, "what are you looking at, what do you glubbin want, Lalonde."

The traffic in the narrow hall has to edge around them. She's got on a black dress and a grey scarf, a filmy thing that doesn't even cover up her neck properly. The dress is some ribby knit, hugs all of her and doesn't reveal a bit of skin save at the collar. It's _severe._ He'd put money on it being Strider who picked it out for her, she doesn't have the taste.

"I came to ask you the same thing," she says. "You never finished our last conversation."

 _"I_ never finished our conversation?"

"You were distracted." Wide-eyed and innocent, she touches his arm, right underneath the patch with Eridan's class symbol. _That_ gets them some attention. She's not fooling anyone, let alone him, not when she was full ready to blow a hole through him before he got -- distracted. Side-tracked. If she were smart, she'd have one of those wands up her sleeves, but from the way she crosses her arms he can tell she doesn't. Nobody walks through High Command unarmed, but here she is. "I forgive you, Adjutant Ampora."

"Thought you an yours weren't interested."

"Perhaps," Rose says, "I've changed my mind. Provisionally."

"You got _conditions_ now," he says.

"Give me a reason to think you're worth anyone's time."

"Not in public," he says, and only the number of people who suddenly have urgent business in the hallway keeps his voice from quavering, keeps him _smooth,_ "sweetheart."

*

Rose has to follow him, which is humiliating enough: being half a pace behind Eridan as he cuts a dashing swathe through the corridors of High Command, like she's nothing but a hanger-on he's idly indulging in her black flirtation. But he learns. He's entirely correct in taking her to some less public venue. It forces her to give him credit he shouldn't deserve.

The corridors swarm with black-uniformed trolls, scurrying back and forth like their anthill has been disturbed, knocked loose of its moorings by the preparations for the Condesce's visit. All of them notice her; all of them would notice her even if she was nowhere near Eridan's fluttering, eyesearing half-cape.

She owes him for the spectacle he made of her in the Super. She isn't wholly averse to his methods.

So Rose calls up the tattered remnants of godhood like a shining second skin, lets the entire hallway illuminate with the haloed sigil of the Light above the crown of her head. Her feet skim up off the floor, and she's nearly level with Eridan's eyes when he turns to gape at her. She takes his forearm, closes her fingers around the chilled skin of his wrist. The other trolls are openly whispering, now.

"What're you doin, Lalonde -- " he says, holding his arm away from his body as if she's infected him with sunlight.

Rose smiles. "Providing further distraction. Where are you taking me?"

"Somewhere the two of us can have a little talk." Livid, Eridan reaches out and wraps the trailing end of her scarf around his hand to tug her toward him through the air, like it's a leash. She lets him. She settles her hands on his shoulders when he says, _"Alone."_ The crowd swallows the act without a thought, quite possibly because it isn't an act at all. Another flare of light, and she's touching the floor again.

"Why, Adjutant Ampora," she says, "I would rather choke on nails."

She dusts off her front, daintily, pays especial attention to the places she brushed against him, and when she holds out her hand for him again he takes it and squeezes, so hard that she can't even pretend her wince is calculated. The titters and gasps tell her that the crowd _approves_ of them. She indulges herself in imagining the embellishments they'll add as Eridan leads her clear of where they're clustered, and into an elevator. By the time the gossip makes it down to the civilian decks and out to the repair ships, she and Eridan will have been destroying each other's clothes. She'll have slapped him, bitten him, made him bleed in front of an appreciative audience, charred his flesh with the fire of an alien god, or however the hiveship has decided her powers work.

They're in a speeding elevator, and they're alone. The tips of Eridan's gill-flaps are flushed, like she's managed to embarrass him. Rose swallows and thinks of nothing.

It spills them out on a level of High Command she's never even thought existed, let alone been to; somewhere deep in the heart of the hiveship, dim and near-silent. Only the infinitesimal groaning of metal hurtling through space, a low stressed hum that's usually masked by the sounds of living people. She is, entirely despite herself, unnerved.

"Do you keep disgraced officials down here?" she asks. Her own voice seems too loud.

"Just engines," says Eridan.

He punches a combination she can't make out into a keypad by one of the heavy metal doors across from the elevator. The door hisses like an airlock when it opens, and Eridan strides over the threshold with just enough hesitation to make her suspicious, but not enough to make her stay away.

Inside, the air is bone-dry. This room is large enough that Eridan's bootheels echo off the metal walls, and bare of furnishings. In the center of it is a soft-lit dome. It's the only source of illumination in the room, and a poor one, at that; it comes up to her shoulders and spreads as far as the eye can see, and farther.

"Don't look at it," Eridan says. "Give yourself a coddamn headache."

The dome -- it's no color and every color at once. Rose takes a step toward it, pushing her sleeves up. She'll put her hands on it, find out what it is. Before she can get close, Eridan grabs her by the upper arm and wrenches her away.

"Don't glubbin _look_ at it," he says, then lets her go as if she's a dead rodent he picked up for reasons he can't remember, and doesn't care to.

Rose looks regardless. It hums, worse than the shiver of stressed metal in the corridor outside -- or in echo of it, she isn't sure. Her forearms go all to gooseflesh. It's not humming to her, but she suspects if she listened, it _could._ Eldritch forces don't distress her nearly as much as they once might have.

When she stops watching the pulse of it, looks up, she can't see the ceiling. It's too far, and the only light comes from the dome and her own skin, flickers of leftover godhood that she tamps down on, hard. _"That's_ an engine?"

"Top of the line, just put in twenty sweeps ago, only needs to be refreshed every six perigees."

"With?"

He shrugs. The gold embroidery on his cape somehow manages to flash in the gloom. "Leftover psionic bits." Tapping his temple, he adds, "The brains, mostly."

"Ah," she says, "waste not. Want not."

"And that's why we're here, Lalonde," he says, "Fef wants to get Sollux back." Rose wonders if he's practiced -- if he's taught himself how to say Sollux's name next to Feferi's without stumbling more than a fraction.

"Before he ends up pieces of an engine," she says. She wants to make him say it again, see if he slips this time.

"If there's enough of him left to make pieces with," Eridan spits, "he's out with the 27th, you ain't got a clue what that means, but it ain't even a little bit pretty. Coddamn mutant's gonna get himself killed, and Fef'll be -- upset."

"And you can't have that, can you."

He sneers at her. "I'd think you'd care about one of us some."

She slides closer to him, almost near enough to get the edge of that horrific cape in her hands. He doesn't move, he watches her like she's an obstinate toy, something that refuses to behave precisely how he wants. "More than you, certainly," she says.

When he flinches, it's almost entirely in the muscles around his eyes. "What're you implyin, I came to _you --"_

"Why did you want to tell this to Terezi?"

He has both her wrists in one of his hands, the snatch so fast she can't do more than hiss in surprise. "'Cause Pyrope's a Legislacerator, Lalonde," he says, squeezing. She won't struggle, even if her heart is a sudden triple-time race against her ribs. She can't stop looking at his teeth. It's only her _body_ that's afraid.

"Go on," she says.

"Can't call him back from High Command," Eridan tells her, softer now. "Tip Fef's hand, me doin that."

"Bad timing, with the Condesce almost here."

Eridan barely acknowledges her. "But the Cruellest Bar -- they can do whatever they glubbin want, long as it ain't illegal."

It hurts, where he has her wrists pressed together. He'd grabbed her like this in the cafe. She's going to bruise if he keeps doing it, keeps crushing her skin between her bones and his grip. She tilts her head up to him, smiles. "You want me to tell Terezi you'd like to buy off the Legislascerators?"

He jerks her closer. They're almost touching, the edges of her scarf brushing against the front of his uniform. She laughs at him, a little breathless, and he shakes his head, grins. It's awful.

"I ain't out to get myself hanged," he says. "You tell her: she oughta figure out how it's _unjust,_ Captor bein stuck out there fightin a whole alliance full of aliens, when he could be so much more useful back here where Fef can see him."

"Ampora," Rose says, "that was nearly worth my while."

When he hisses, infuriated, it's satisfying.

"You don't get it," he says. He forces her to unfurl her fingers, so that he's holding her hands flat instead of fisted. There isn't any point in fighting him, she tells herself, and grits her teeth when he says, "Pyrope and Captor, they've known each other since they got spat out of the caverns, and if you weren't so glubbin contrary -- "

 _"I'm_ contrary -- "

"Like you're two sweeps old and kickin and screamin while your lusus drags you back home by the scruff of your neck," says Eridan. He's doing a very bad job of pretending to be calm, this close up. Perhaps she'd be fooled from a distance, but she's near enough to feel him breathe, feel the catches and the shallowness and the speed.

She throws his own words back at him: "I came to _you."_

"Look, this ain't about me or you, Lalonde," he says, "it's about gettin Captor back. One of _us._ And Pyrope can help do that."

She has no doubt that he's clever enough to fake the desperate emphasis on _us,_ but -- he's right. He's right, and she'd like to tear him open for it.

"You're thinking about someone other than yourself?" Were her hands free, she would have pressed one delicately to her chest, or perhaps the back of her wrist to her forehead. "Be careful," she says, all saccharine concern, "try not to strain anything, you can't possibly be used to it."

"You might wanna give it a try yourself, considerin what I've been on my hands and knees beggin you to do since we came down here."

Her mouth goes dry, and when she jerks her chin upward to look at him, their eyes meet, truly meet, for the first time. Eridan exhales hard through his gillflaps and makes as though to shove her away, and there is something immensely gratifying about the fact that he can't seem to let her go.

"That cape," Rose finds herself saying.

"Got a problem with it?"

"I _hate_ that cape."

Eridan shivers like a struck tuning fork at the word, his hands clamping down harder on hers -- he likes hurting her there, she thinks, likes how she feels in his fingers -- and steps forward, makes the space between them shrink to nearly nothing.

"What're you gonna do about it?" he breathes. She can feel the exhalation on her cheeks.

He thinks he has her trapped.

On the walls, the shadows swarm for her, crawl out of their corners and up around her feet, a whipcord tangle that sings cold counterpoint to the speed of her heart. Eridan's eyes on hers widen, surprise-blank, and she can see her own flash white in the reflection of his irises. Her shadows wreathe them both, a sussuration, and when she bares her teeth -- human, omnivorous, _harmless_ \-- they close on the crushed-velvet fabric of that ridiculous, unbelievably awful half-cape and shred it to tatters.

The tattered scraps of purple and gold litter the floor next to them, and Eridan snarls. "Lesson in _showmanship,_ Rose?" For all the scant distance between them matters, they might as well be pressed against one another. Rose doesn't bat him away when he releases her and lunges for her scarf instead. The watery silk slides off of her throat like a caress. He dangles it over her head, makes her watch as he puts a single claw straight through it. It tears clean, a great, long hole down the entire length of fabric.

She's still watching it when he tosses it aside, shamefully distracted. He grabs the nape of her neck and turns her to face him, and then jerks her entire body upward, onto her toes. Slowly, he lowers his mouth to the very front of her throat. His teeth prick her skin, gaping-mawed. If she breathes too deeply she'll cut herself open.

He isn't holding her tightly at all. If she wanted, she could run, terrified as any conquered species before a superior power.

"Yes," Rose says, "they're very sharp, congratulations." The motion of her jaw pushes her neck up into Eridan's teeth, just enough to make her hands shake when she settles them on his shoulders. "You simply must tell me who files them; Terezi would be delighted."

She wraps a hand around one of his horns, and he says, "Think you're funny, Lalonde." But the sound he makes is a bit like _hurt_ and a lot like _wanting,_ and she strokes a finger over the underside of it, to the place where it bends, just to hear him make it again. "Think you're glubbin _funny."_

"Oh," she says. "Frequently." She maneuvers his mouth off of her neck with the lightest of touches, but not before he manages to nick her. The pain is sharp and very clear. Eridan Ampora is liquid under her hands. Her palm slides against the smooth bone, over the gradations of color, the shift from red to orange. He whimpers, the sound caught behind his teeth, tries to shake her off, but she's worked the fingers of her other hand into the fabric of his uniform, clutching his shoulder.

She wants nothing more than to make him squirm away from her like that, needing and horrified by it, over and over again. She's horrified herself. Her stomach roils. If she opens her mouth she cannot trust herself to keep quiet.

Eridan grabs her hips and _lifts_ her, spins them both and shoves her bodily against the glowing dome of half-used-up psionics. The groan of propulsion vibrates through her spine, makes the room spin, an outrush of whispering at the edges of her mind, and then Eridan's thigh is between her legs and her mouth is open on his, tearing, and she is not listening to the engines at all. There is nothing calculated in this kiss, she thinks, disgusted in some dim and fast-fading part of her mind, Eridan has her as helpless as she has him and she's suddenly ashamed of letting him see her like this.

He pulls back. They're staring at each other. His pupils are blown wide, only the most miniscule edge of iris visible. She tries to find enough breath, enough wit, to tell him how pathetic he looks.

He shuts his eyes, tilts his head away from her, and descends on her throat. She's braced for teeth, for the exhilarating breathless anticipation of him poised to tear out her throat, but he gives her neither. His tongue is warm, wet against her skin. He finds the droplets of her blood where they've welled up and _licks._ It's worse than tickling, the slide of it _stronger,_ and she feels like she might scream if he doesn't stop, like she ought to shove him away and can't bear to all at once. He licks her again, harder, seeking.

She reaches for the buttons of his collar, picks them open with her nails. His pulse, even racing, is slower by half than hers.

Behind her eyelids, the vastness of space, a stretching emptiness and the illusion of speed, the wheel of stars screaming past -- these are _not her thoughts,_ she knows the shape of _otherness_ curled close at the base of her brainstem.

She opens her eyes, shoves Eridan away from her. The thing approaching them is a yellowblood -- no, it's a pure goldblood, Rose can more than tell the difference by now. It was female, once. Now it moves as though controlled by a highly competent, deeply disinterested puppeteer. It is headed straight for them, its stride sure and even.

When Eridan catches sight of it, he sucks in a breath and lifts Rose clear off of the dome. Her dress rucks up about her hips as she wraps her legs more firmly around him for support. She opens her mouth to speak, but he shakes his head, carries her a few near-silent steps into the shadows by the wall. The goldblood passes them by.

Its eyes are burnt-out, empty holes. All Rose can think of is -- rising from the Green Sun, new flesh on new bones, and the first trolls to meet her --

"Captor's not gonna end up bits in a tank." Eridan sets her down on her feet and begins putting his clothing to rights. "Somethin's gonna break in his head, sooner or later, and they'll use him for that."

"That," says Rose, pulling her dress down and watching the goldblood pause to stroke the glass dome. Forms butt up against the surface of it, eager for something that Rose doesn't care to think about. "What _was_ that."

"The helmsman," he says. He's neglected to do up the buttons she opened. She isn't inclined to remind him. "Brains are the engine, helmsman's the rudder, Condesce's touch keeps 'em alive. This one's older than the hiveship."

She can see the gears turning in Eridan's head, not quite hidden behind his clipped, shaken tone: if he's forthcoming, if he horrifies her enough, she'll do what he wants. "I see." The cuts on her throat sting when she speaks.

"So, fuck, are you gonna -- "

"Yes, Eridan," she says, and picks up her torn scarf to hide the marks. Dave chose it out for her, wouldn't let her leave the hivesuite without it on; she'd like to think he'd kill her for ruining it like this, but he'll just laugh. "I will."

She wants nothing more than to leave Eridan here, in the depths of the ship. She won't be able to find her way back to the civilian decks without him.

"All right," he says to her. She nods. It feels like a pact. Behind them, the helmsman wanders onward, into the dimness. Rose feels its presence fade, the siren croon of empty parsecs diminish. Eridan doesn't take her arm. They walk to the elevator together, without touching.

*

The communicator chimes while Eridan's standing at the counter in his hivesuite's kitchen, drinking coffee out of a mug emblazoned with LONG MAY SHE REIGN in violet capitals. _Go forth and conquer the stars,_ they'd said at the commencement, _and have some dishware to go with your service pistol._ The other half of the set, O'ER THE STARS AND THE DEEPS, sits in the sink, filthy beyond any attempt at saving. He tries, once in a while.

Another chime, and he takes a swig and ignores it. If the general wants him to come in to work early, the general should have put in a change in the duty roster. Eridan's got better ways to spend his time this morning. He's going to drink a whole pot of coffee with actual lusus-milk in it, and read his backlog of memos, and if he thinks of Rose while he's at it, it'll be because he's gotten her to come around a little to what _needs to be done._

The chiming doesn't stop. It's worse than Trollian.

 _Fuckin fine,_ Eridan thinks, and plugs the communicator into his ear. "Adjutant Ampora."

"Eridan?" says Feferi, and he hasn't heard her sound like that, all quavery and hesitant, since they weren't more than four sweeps old.

He sits down at his kitchen table, shoves aside a stack of military histories he's retrieved from High Command's library and hasn't gotten around to reading. "Fef," he says, "what's goin on with you." On the other end of the line, she exhales, and he can hear the bubbles in it. Fast, maybe panicked. His first thought is, _we've been found out, we're all fucked,_ and the aftertaste of the coffee turns to acid in his mouth. "C'mon, spit it out."

"I can't tell you over the glubbing _phone,_ Eridan!"

"Right." He sets his mug down, then twists the communicator in his ear and tries to think while Feferi just breathes on the other end. If they were actually fucked, if someone way high up hadn't gotten word to Feferi first, he wouldn't be standing right now. Not with the Condesce on her way, not with the hiveship crawling with the Imperial Guard. "Where do you want me?"

One more deep exhale, and then Eridan can practically hear Feferi straightening up, coming to attention. "My quarters," she says. He bets she's got her trident in hand and everything, fingertips playing over the tines, surveying imaginary troops in her head.

Feferi's place is a third of the hiveship away from his; he runs when nobody's looking and abuses his elevator override at least four times. He's not even winded by the time he gets there.

This time, she _is_ waiting for him.

The water of her hivesuite tastes wrong going over his gills, tastes _thick,_ and then he spots the ribbon of rich purple rising from Feferi's forearm.

"Fuck --" he says, not even hello, can't say anything else while he's looking at the streamers of her spreading in the water. Even bleeding she moves so fast, one kick and she's across the room to him in a cloud of color-tinged foam. Her arms go around his neck and she presses her face into his collar and he doesn't know what to do with his hands. They're not even pale, Fef and him, not now and not ever again, he doesn't know if this is what pale would glubbin feel like, being too scared to touch her for fear she'll stop holding on.

He pats her hair. The taste of her blood is all through him, washing in and out.

"You're bleedin, Fef," he says, and gingerly lowers his fingertips to where her skin gapes open, all the way across the back of her hand and curving down the side of her wrist. The edges are clean, at least.

Feferi shoves him away hard, jackknifing off his stomach with her feet so he goes spinning into the hivesuite wall. When he gets his bearings again she's all the way on the other end of the room.

"She's already here," she says, "in the outer orbit of the fleet, only the really high-ups know about it."

She's gone hunting-still, never mind that it's her own blood in the water. No sudden movements, no reaching for anything, Eridan stays against the wall where she shoved him and he says, "What happened?"

There isn't a single trident sign in the room, he notes, waiting for her to relax enough to speak. Not a single splash of Tyrian purple. The cuttlefish are restless in their force-shielded cages, and Feferi swims over to one of them and takes the little thing out, strokes its back. He's waiting for -- something, for her to sink her teeth into its cuttlebone and gouge it out, but instead she puts it back and shuts the door behind it.

"I got an invitation," Feferi says. There's false cheer in her voice, but not on her face. "Another one. It wasn't like the last time, when we first got here. I got a nice shuttle and everything, I didn't even have an -- an escort this time, not a single guard, Eridan, it was so nice of her. She said she wanted to show me something. My _real_ inheritance. What I'd get if I won the game, something better and nicer and brighter than the whole empire _combined."_

"And what's -- "

"She showed me the Helmsman."

"The Helmsman's a story," says Eridan. "Mustardbloods tell it to wigglers to scare the trousers off em."

As soon as the words come out of his mouth, he knows: he shouldn't have said anything, he shouldn't have interrupted, because now Feferi's vibrating with rage, real highblood rage, like an unhinged indigoblood but worse. And then she turns it off, just like that. Lightswitch on, lightswitch off. "He was there," she says, words tumbling out all over each other, "and she -- she stroked his face, and he was alive and he knew I was there, and he wanted to _die,_ so bad. But she doesn't let him. She never will."

She looks like she's waiting for him to say something, so he dares ask, "What'd he look like?"

"Red and blue glasses." Feferi hugs herself tight, and doesn't seem to realize she's doing it. "Glasses, and two sets of horns."

"Like Captor, then," says Eridan, and immediately wishes he'd kept his coddamn trap shut, because she stares at him from all the way on the other side of her hive and her eyes go right through him, carve his chest open. He never wants her to look at him like that.

"What do you fucking think, Eridan," she says. "Her Helmsman's his _ancestor,_ we both _knew_ it, and she showed him off to me like he's a prize, a trophy she could just _hand over!"_

"She's tryin to provoke you --"

"She did a really good job!"

 _Reely,_ Eridan thinks. There isn't a fish pun within a mile of her right now. "I'm gonna get him back for you -- Captor, I mean," he starts.

"I should get him back my own self," Feferi snaps, "before the Empress decides she wants a new toy. He was _part of the ship._ It grew into him."

Eridan should go over to her and he doesn't dare. "We _can't,"_ he says. "You've been sayin for perigees that it's too soon, the Condesce'd squash us if we tried yet, Fef, you've been tellin _me."_

She lets herself go and floats, drifts a little in the currents of the room. The water around her's gone pink all-through. "Maybe we don't have any more time to wait," she says.

Behind him, the hivesuite door irises open again, and Eridan kicks off the floor before he can even think, goes for his service pistol and wants a harpoon instead, it'd be just like the Condesce to ambush them in Feferi's own suite.

John Egbert puts his hands up, grinning like a moron, and says "Don't shoot!" more cheerfully than anyone walking into a room with two seadwellers should. The patch on the arm of his mechanic's jumpsuit is the Breath symbol instead of a class sign, and he sucks in lungsful of water without any gills the same way Rose lights up like a fucking Twelfth Perigee's Eve tree. "Vriska sent me, I come in peace."

Eridan's tempted to keep his pistol trained on him, just to be contrary. Egbert's so clumsy in the water when he swims over to Feferi that it hurts to watch, trying for a breaststroke, like a soft-bellied one-legged frog doing its best to wiggle its way over to a shark.

Feferi takes mercy on him and meets him halfway, and just like that, Eridan hardly exists. The two of them may as well be pale for each other, the way Egbert clings to her and manages to pull her into his arms at the same time.

"Oh," John says, "hey, you're bleeding, how'd that happen?"

"I'll go get bandages," says Eridan, just to avoid the rockslide of happy patter that John's about to start up to distract Feferi. If he's seen this once, he's seen this ten times. The bandages are in the cabinet next to Feferi's bathroom. He knows where every glubbin thing is in this suite, it'd take Egbert whole useless minutes to find them, and Feferi'd still be bleeding for each one.

It hadn't even crossed his mind to wrap her up before Egbert mentioned it. He's worse than scum growing on barnacles on a ship, he'd just let his princess talk at him and didn't even take the time to fix her up proper.

When he gets back with the bandages clutched in one hand, Egbert's got her on the couch, her snugged into the corner and him not knowing enough about moving under water to keep his rear on the cushions. Eridan tosses the bandages and only barely manages not to fidget while Egbert takes his time fussing over her.

"Look at me." Egbert floats above her, still holding her hand so he doesn't drift away. She's not looking at him, but that's probably not the point. "We're going to be fine, you're going to be fine, if anyone can get Sollux back it's Terezi, right? You know that."

"How do _you_ know about that?" Eridan mutters. He doesn't have to have been around to know the rest of the speech Egbert probably just gave her: _of course we can win! We're the Forces of Good! We just have to be smart and someday we're going to make everything okay._ And it never fails to make Feferi perk up, just like she has now. Only a little, but enough to make Eridan wish he could still pull it off so easy, if he'd ever been able to pull it off in the first place.

"She forwarded me your message," Egbert says, and the _duh_ carries loud and clear through the water. "We have the same encryption? Or something."

"Same encryption," she says. All the humans are so easy to throw around; John's got half a foot or more on Feferi and she still pulls him down to sit on the couch, as effortless as she lifts her trident, and holds him there.

If Egbert weren't running his fingers over the edges of her bandage, making sure every little bit's tucked in its right place, maybe Eridan could've kept his mouth shut. "Maybe we should glubbin fix that -- "

"Eridan," Feferi cuts in, before he can work a good rant up. "I want to see Rose."

Egbert's hands have stopped moving. The faint reassuring smile plastered on his face drops clear away. "Let me get her," he says, "you know, if you really want to see her. If you _reely,_ even."

There's something between them here, something Eridan hasn't been told. Something they weren't going to even tell him to begin with. "I'll take care of it," he says, then kicks his way to the floor of the hivesuite and makes for the door: Feferi wants Rose, she'll get Rose, she'll get her _gift-wrapped_ with a bow on top and another one stuffed in her mouth to keep her quiet. It's the least he can do, after all.

What stings the most is -- neither of them tries to stop him.

*

Rose derives a special pleasure from taking every statistical modeling course the Ninth Hivefleet's university offers, partially out of one last backhanded salute to Mother Dearest, she of _science is meant to be applied, Rose, an obsession with proofs is a sign of a fundamentally obtuse and asocial mind,_ and partially to keep her hand in -- it's one thing to shut her eyes and see a tangle of probabilities stretching out limitless, ninety-eight percent of them ending in violence, death, or darker things, and another entirely to understand why it's ninety-eight percent and not ninety-seven point three five.

For that she needs discrete-time martingales and what back on earth was called a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis. The Alternian's a simpler word, and a far cruder one; the scholars who developed it were, allegedly, in the habit of seeing what names they could get past the university censors.

Three years in and she's _spectacularly_ good at all of it, even without bothering to cheat on her exams by virtue of having once been a god.

They've changed out the banners on either side of the blackboard: the violet-on-black class symbol of the fleet's high admiral has been replaced by the Condesce's Tyrian purple on a white field. It draws the eye and makes every one of the thirty trolls in the lecture hall nervous and ill to their stomachs. The blueblood next to Rose, Murein, shifts in her seat and checks her timepiece, not subtly. Just under an hour to go, and then Rose is free for the day. She's due to intercept Jade on her way out of the astrophysics corridors and take her to meet Dave and John for lunch.

The hall is meant to seat three hundred or more. When someone flings the doors open, the sound echoes off of every surface, and every head but Rose's whips around; Murein's horns nearly put out her eye. Their tiny greenblood professor looks near ready to faint when the intruder's bootheels click down the aisle.

Eridan Ampora sweeps his gaze over the class. No one breathes, and something in Rose convulses and shrivels with horror. "Got some business with one of your students, Dr. -- "

"Lerias," the professor says.

Somehow, Eridan manages to smile at him without revealing too much tooth, a polished smile, nothing less than the bright young face of High Command. Dr. Lerias relaxes visibly. "I'm lookin for a Rose Lalonde," he goes on. "Don't worry, she ain't in trouble, me and her've got -- military business. To discuss."

She could kill him for that suggestive pause. Murein raises her hand and points down at Rose. "She's right here, Adjutant."

The only possible thing to do is stand, brush off the front of her skirt, and hope that she can maintain an appropriate degree of austere pallor in her cheeks. How _dare_ he assume that he has the slightest claim to her time, let alone the time of nearly thirty statisticians and whatever integrity the academic process possesses in a military dictatorship anyhow.

"Just a moment, Ampora," she says, gathering each of her pens and notebooks, one by one. Behind her, there's a rush of tittering and the sound of someone being vigorously shushed. Apparently Alternian social norms dictate that gossip is inappropriate while the subjects of said gossip are still in the process of creating it. Rose learns something new every day.

She walks down to the front of the lecture hall with her shoulders square and the weight of thirty pairs of eyes affixed to the place between her shoulderblades, _portrait of Rose Lalonde as a walking target._ It's heady. Eridan owes her, she thinks, for each minute he forces her to enjoy being a political talking point.

"Let's not waste any more of Professor Lerias's valuable time," she says when she's arrived at Eridan's side. "Whatever _High Command_ needs me for must be quite urgent."

"You have no glubbin idea," Eridan says. Then he leads her from the room, skimming his hand over the small of her back before taking her elbow, every inch the dashing young officer. And none of her giggling midblood classmates have the faintest idea about -- anything. All they see is violet blood and gill-slits in front of his ears, a night-black uniform and a sidearm at his hip.

The door slams shut behind them and he sweeps her along until they turn a corner, faster than she'd expected, like he actually had some real reason for pulling her out of class. She does _not_ care. She drags her arm out of his grasp and stalks two paces ahead of him, makes _him_ hurry to keep up with her. "I hope you had an excellent reason for that," she says. "I hope High Command is desperate to know exactly what battle plan of all possible battle plans they need to prevent certain disaster, because otherwise I will be forced to believe that you've somehow taken it into your unbelievably thick skull that I'm your plaything."

"I've got reasons," Eridan says, snide, and catches her around the upper arm again.

"Just because I've sunk to such depths as to swap spit with you hardly gives you either license or claim sufficient to imagine I'm the object of your very own personal fetch quest." They bang through the Mathematactics Building's front door and nearly run down the steps. "Not to mention," Rose goes on, her feet barely hitting the ground, borne aloft by the advantage of his height and her own exultant and vicious pique, "that last piece of theater, are you pretending that I'm _flushed_ for you now, that I'm just waiting for your courtesy and courtship, as if you'd have the slightest idea what I or anyone else would ever want from _that_ quadrant --"

She expects Eridan to shove her away, but he doesn't. He turns them sharply to the left, almost drags her off her feet entirely and makes them hurry straight down the center of the quad toward the University gate. There are spots of violet riding his cheekbones and every angle of him is made of tension. "Oh," he spits, "so you're keepin me around for, what-- your sad alien attempt at a real black romance, that it? All I'm good for?"

"No," she says. "No, you're a distraction. I've been so bored, you see, and conspiracy is exciting."

"What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"

"Eridan Ampora, I think you're a duplicitous, power-hungry _murderer."_ The flush across his cheeks deepens and she goes on, just because she can. "But you're far too pathetic for me to hate."

The crispness of his accent goes muddy with something she can only identify as a mix of tenderness and violent horror. "You don't even know where I'm takin you," he says.

She swallows. "No. I don't."

"You pick _that_ outta all our futures, fakemage, instead of playin games with how far you can push me." They've stopped walking. He's poised, tilted fractionally toward her, staring like staring might devour her whole. Rather than grab her, or throw her, he touches the tip of one of his claws to the crease between her eyelid and her orbital bone and prods. She flinches away from him. "Don't need those, do you? Then when I'm done, we can talk about _hate."_

Then a swarm of first-year students pours from the Mathematactics Building, parting around them as though they're stones in the current of a river. She inhales on Eridan's exhale and turns toward the gate. "We're gonna go see Fef," he says. He doesn't want to throttle _her,_ he wants to throttle the entire world. It's reassuring, but only just. "Just a fetch quest."

"And she didn't give you a reason."

"She doesn't have to, Lalonde."

Rose keeps walking. She can feel his eyes on her back, the same -- or stronger -- as the eyes of all her classmates back inside the lecture hall. He draws even with her as they pass under the gate's archway and out beyond the University's grounds, into the narrow halls of Deck 17.

The sensation of someone watching her doesn't go away. It takes her another minute, a minute of walking stilted and stiff beside him toward the elevators that lead toward the Hiveship's center, for her to be sure of it.

"Are you aware we're being followed," she says, conversationally.

"I've always got a tail," Eridan says, _"two_ tails, one for Vimsha, one for Gezlan. It's like sayin hello."

"Yes, you all enjoy having people followed, but -- "

"But what?"

Rose puts a hand on his arm and pretends to point at something, turning them around just enough to look. "There are four."

They're not trying to be subtle; they're wearing white armbands marked with purple tridents over their uniforms, and the rest of the trolls in the corridor suddenly have somewhere else to be. They're from Her Imperious Condescension's personal battalion. They're being followed by the Alternian version of a Roman imperial guard, and instead of swords and sandals these four have got laser rifles slung across their backs.

They draw to a halt and Eridan raises both of his eyebrows at them, the very picture of puzzled innocence. Rose has no idea how that expression is even capable of occupying his face.

"Is there somethin we can help you with, Captain," he says to the tallest of them, a whip-thin seadweller with gillflaps almost as narrow and long as her horns.

The others fall into formation behind her. "Adjutant Ampora," she says, "we won't take up too much of your time."

All of them look a bit like Eridan, or what Rose can only imagine Eridan aspires to look like, in his long, lonely nights: lean, elegant killers, forged in battle, adversity, and profoundly uncomfortable sniper's perches. _Praeterrors,_ they're called. The captain and two of her men are seadwellers, and the last is a tiny, feverish psionic, her lieutenant's pips in rich brown. "No, you won't," Eridan says, then repeats, "there somethin we can _help_ you with?"

"You left Commandant Peixes's hivesuite in a great hurry." All of her people come to attention in unison as she adds, "You understand that it's our duty to protect the Heiress, as well as Her Imperious Condescension."

If Eridan attempts to play the _waxing black private time_ card one more time, Rose will make him suffocate on his own entrails. "Commandant Peixes, huh," he says, "she was fine when I left, what happened after?" He doesn't say _Fallin down on the job, are we;_ he doesn't have to.

"Oh, nothing," says the captain. "We just need to know where you're headed." She's _old,_ her needle-toothed grin stained yellow by time. Her people, arrayed behind her, are flawlessly blank in contrast. "Adjutant."

"You accusin me of something?"

 _"Should_ I be?"

Rose promptly revises her opinion of the captain from _old_ to _ancient._ All of Eridan's horrible, false charm that smoothed over his pulling her out of class is useless here. His smile falls flat next to the narrow slice of teeth in this Praeterror's mouth. He can't talk them out of this. They're outnumbered, and Rose stopped bringing her wands to class more than a sweep ago, which means they're also outgunned.

Two trolls round the corner, one of them laughing and the other one untying and re-tying her own white armband. They stop dead in their tracks when the captain turns around to regard them with a frown, an arched eyebrow, and crossed arms.

"Ma'am," the laughing one says, immediately ceasing to laugh.

"Corporal," says the captain.

The one with the armband elbows the no-longer-laughing one in the ribs, and they give her the crispest salutes Rose has seen outside of terrible historical war films. "We were assigned to the Rose human's detail," Armband says. "Ma'am." Not-Laughing nods along with her.

They've been following _her._ One set of Praeterrors for Eridan, one for her, and while she could expend some effort on being insulted that she only gets two of the Condesce's personal regiment and he's got half a squadron, she's too occupied with realizing that her tail and his came from different directions.

"I see," the captain says. She turns back to Eridan. "We're aware of your association with this alien. Let me ask you one more time -- what is your destination this afternoon, Adjutant?"

They were watching the whole time, and if they've been watching her, they'll have been watching all sixteen of them. She wonders if this fetch quest of Eridan's is meant to announce to the Condesce that Feferi wants to see one of the humans, and at speed -- she wonders, and rejects the possibility just as fast. There's too much tension in how Eridan puffs himself up in front of the captain, too much posturing and bluster. He doesn't think he can win.

She knows he can't. How fortunate, then, that the game has left her just sufficient power to lead them to victory. She locks her knees, unfocuses her eyes, looks at nothing but the metal of the floor. Eridan's still trying to talk them free of this. The Light, when it takes her eyes, is merciful enough to block out his voice.

To begin with, she needs a victory condition, as unambiguous as possible. Her powers are sly, occasionally whimsical, often enough cruel -- they remind her of Vriska, which is only appropriate -- and if she does not keep a careful hand on the reins the probabilities get muddy, lead her into traps. She's blind when she's like this, or at least she sees only what _might be._

Victory, Rose decides, is _a secret and safe location._ It's not as clear as she'd like, but it will have to do. She and Eridan don't have time for a more precise formulation.

 _Deciding_ gives her vision again: ghost-tracks of their future selves, running along one corridor or another, at least three routes to secret and safe marked in glimmers of cream and orange, bright enough to block out the shapes of the Praeterrors and the curve of the walls. If she picks one -- _when_ she picks one, selects amongst the probabilities of success each one whispers in her mind, the Light _may_ show her the remainder of the route.

Seers _choose._ Or recommend choice. Rose prefers the second and has hardly ever gotten the opportunity to be so little involved.

She slides her arm into Eridan's, cuddles up to his side as if she's frightened of the scary aliens and their raised voices -- Eridan will know otherwise, Eridan knows her better than to believe this particular pile of horseshit, and that realization is horrific in and of itself -- and chooses the second path of three, a twisting loop to the left.

They're going to have to run.

Eridan sees it a moment after she moves. He says one last thing to the captain, a distant hiss of syllables that Rose can hardly hear through the scrim of Light and wishes he hadn't bothered with, it'll be another quip that falls flat, a remonstration that will demand recompense, it makes the probability of their escaping unscathed _contort,_ slide farther away from what she can grasp. At last -- two seconds, two and a half seconds, later than she wants -- he runs after her, and they're careening down the corridor. It's too narrow for the Guardsmen to follow them easily, they'll end up in a long string.

She can hear the sound of all six laser pistols being unholstered behind them, and a shouted command. The Light is never kind, but it is often demonstrative. _This is how you may die, given the current circumstances._

"Nice of you to join us," Eridan shouts at her as they run. He's caught her hand in his, their palms locked together. "You coulda helped me back there, you know!"

The trail of their future selves bends sharply to the right, a ninety-degree turn that brightens as she approaches it, brightens and doesn't end in a spreading puddle of their blood. "Turn right," she hisses, and he does, pivots so quickly that he almost pulls her arm from her socket. The change in the angle of their momentum drags at their speed. Rose has the space of a breath between _knowing_ what is about to happen and hearing the subsonic blast of the lasers, three pulses and then Eridan's spitting curses, words in Alternian that she has only very rarely heard aloud.

He doesn't stop running. Perhaps there's something to be said for the training provided by the Alternian military after all. Troll flesh smells the same as human flesh when it's charred. Her field of vision sparks and glimmers and she can only see in flashes: the rent hole in the shoulder of his uniform, smoking and surrounded by an ooze of violet; the gesture of the Praeterror captain behind them, _follow them!;_ the way this corridor branches, doubles back on itself; the beginnings of the shape of their eventual destination, a dark and hollow place somewhere in the bowels of the hiveship.

"You sure you know where you're going?" Eridan says, bitten off through his teeth. Each of his breaths is controlled, paced to the speed of his feet. He's in far better shape than she is. She should have figured on that particular bit of humiliation. Her lungs are burning already.

"I _couldn't_ have helped you, I'm only barely a person, they wouldn't have listened," Rose says, _gasps._ She tries to tell herself to even it out, that if she can match her breathing _one-two-three-four_ in time with her steps, she'll be fine, but Eridan scoops her up instead -- gets her cradled against his chest, one arm looped under her knees and the other around her ribs, like a seat.

"Glubbin _slow,_ Lalonde, how do you expect us to carry on a proper chase like this?" Eridan mutters into her ear, low and grumpy. He's bleeding all over her, a steady, thin trickle from the hole in his shoulder, which is the least undignified part of the entire situation.

And yet, if he's offering, far be it from her to refuse. She shuts her eyes and points their way, and the Light doesn't take her under nearly deep enough for her to miss the shrieks of pedestrians or ignore the way the thud of his footsteps on metal jars her teeth. "Lost em," he says, finally, "and you'd better not be fuckin sleepin down there."

"We haven't." She burrows into his collarbone and grins at the disgusted sound he makes. "Lost them, that is. A left, a right, and down the access stairs, and we will have."

"You sure?"

 _I hope so,_ she thinks, but she nods; any doubt shown at this stage will reduce their chances of success by up to a third, and those are already low enough that she won't risk it. He listens, he _does as he's told,_ and she doesn't bother to deny how satisfied that makes her feel. The trip down the access stairs rattles her; he takes them two at a time. Everything smells of laserburn and chalk-spice blood and dust.

Rose pries her eyes open. The Light is gone, like she'd never called it up at all. She's in some dim-lit half-abandoned cargo bay, curled up in Eridan Ampora's arms like the heroine on the cover of the trashiest sort of romance novel, and she feels hollowed-out: empty, buzzing with the beginnings of a headache, and filthy.

"Put me down," she says, and shoves her palm against the hole in his shoulder. The bleeding's mostly stopped anyhow, laser wounds self-cauterize.

"Fuck, Rose!" Eridan snaps, and drops her.

She is going to have bruises on her ass from hitting the floor, and larger bruises on her ego from scrambling undignified to her feet again. "Not what I _meant,"_ she says.

He sneers at her, then looks around and kicks at something she can't see. "There's nothin here but decommed ship parts."

"And enough dust to choke a two-credit hatestud, yes. I haven't the faintest idea," Rose says, as primly as she can, "but it's where we're supposed to be."

 _"Supposed_ to be." He prods at his wound and shrugs. "We've gotta call Fef."

The temptation to pat Eridan's chest just beneath the wound isn't even worth resisting. He winces, and with a grunt, knocks her hand aside and takes her shoulders. His thumb presses into the skin right over her collarbone, as though marking out the spot where he'll give her a matching hole, if she likes. If she keeps _pushing_ him.

"What are you waiting for, Ampora?" she says. "You have a call to make." She looks up at him and knows he can see her smirk in the darkness.

He leans over her, close enough that she can feel his breath on her lips, and she tells herself she's braced, tells herself she isn't waiting for him to close the gap between them. "I'm only keepin you alive because Fef wants to see you," he says. "Wouldn't want you to forget."

He's almost certainly lying; he is Eridan Ampora and is therefore definitionally desperate to fill any quadrant he can get his webbed hands on, and one doesn't kill one's kismesis -- one's lofty and unattainable black crush, she corrects herself. Her shoulder is damp with his blood, the light grey of her tee-shirt stained, quite possibly forever. She waits for him to finish fiddling with his communicator, gritting her teeth against the chill.

*

This dock, it turns out, is where Vriska Serket loads and unloads something Egbert's awfully cagey about over the comm, ha ha, Eridan, nothing to see there, really, and if there was anything in it for Eridan, busting up a presumed smuggling ring, he'd tip off the proper authorities.

Lucky for them, there isn't. "Egbert says we've gotta wait a little bit, but they've got Fef and they're gonna get us," he says.

Rose slumps up against a cargo crate, something metal and labeled _HAZARDOUS._ There's enough light for _him_ to read it, at least, judging by the way Rose tripped over near everything in her path when she walked away from him. She's blind as Terezi down here. No heat, and they're lucky they've even got oxygen. This bay is a disaster. Someone should send in a report. (Not his problem.)

"That's good," Rose says, "good work."

"They'll hail us through the little window in the bay door, three pulses of light." He walks over, kicking junk out of the way as he goes, and sits down next to her, then puts the tips of his fingers on the top of her head and turns her to look in the right direction. "You can't see shit, I know."

She bats his hand away and draws her knees up to her chest. "How observant."

"Can't just turn on the Light thing?"

"I've been doing the _Light thing_ for the past twenty minutes," she says, "the batteries are dead, but thank you for the suggestion."

It takes him a second to realize that the wavering in her voice is from her chattering teeth. She sounds nearly as bad as the maroonbloods did on the ice planet where he served his first campaign. He could offer her his uniform coat, but it's a shitload more gratifying to watch her hug herself and look all piteous up at the ceiling. Maybe she'll ask him for it, when the shivers get bad enough; maybe he'll make her beg, for that _murderer_ remark.

"So they really bring you up to High Command," Eridan says, instead of lording anything over her. Just making conversation, pleasant and calm and as untouched by the cold as you glubbin please.

Rose tucks her hands under her armpits. "And they don't send an adjutant to fetch me, either."

"So, what, they -- "

"Put battle plans in front of me," she says, "and make me do the Light thing, yes. Never more than once every few perigees. I imagine you're too far down the chain of command to know about it."

She's not worth sneering at, not when she's this transparent and not when she can't appreciate the full effect. He says, "You'd like to think, wouldn't you," and gets up to pace back and forth between her and the cargo bay doors. He's leaving all sorts of tracks in the dust, but Vriska's ship'll land right on top of them, skew the trail. He hasn't got a glubbin clue how he's going to explain this jaunt to General Ismene. Running from the Praeterrors is enough to get you court-martialed on its own, on the off chance you survive it.

The bay door blinks, three flashes. Eridan gets himself out of the way while it swings open and Vriska lands in a huge plume of dust and swirling debris.

Vriska's flamboyant, is what she is, and her starship's what happens when flamboyant meets Egbert's inexhaustible enthusiasm. It's not bigger than the fighter it's listed as in the hiveship's manifests, but it's got an extra cargo hatch and more visible cannonry than anything in its weight class should, and only most of it's legal, from the looks of it. Scrawled on the side of it, in troll-high scarlet and cerulean, is the legend _H.C.S. WINDFUCKER._ Rose's stumbled her way to stand next to him, and she raises one skeptical eyebrow at the ship like she can't believe the shitheap they're about to be rescued by either.

The hatch peels open and there's Egbert himself, waving like the two of them have just came back from a nice commerce planet vacation. "Hey! Hey, Rose! Eridan! Found you guys!"

"Took you long enough," Eridan mutters, but Egbert ignores him entirely. He clangs his way down the hatchway stairs and sweeps Rose into a giant hug, spinning her around. Rose shivers one last time -- playing it up, Eridan's sure of it -- and Egbert rubs her back.

"So you got away from the Praeterrors on foot, huh," says Egbert, ushering them onto the ship. He doesn't let Rose go for a second, not even when the acceleration jolts the entire hold and they all stumble.

"Ampora did most of the _foot,_ I'm afraid." She squeezes Egbert hard, rests her cheek against his chest. "I pointed the way."

"Rose." Holding her at arm's length, Egbert tweaks her bright red nose, and she swats at his fingers. "You know that if you use your Seer powers too much, you'll go -- "

 _"Blind,"_ they say in unison. Whatever _that_ means, they're the last four humans in the universe, it's probably a culture thing. They both break down into a giggling fit, and Egbert's the first to straighten up, Rose in his arms shaking more with laughter than with cold.

"Hate to interrupt," Eridan says, "but where's Fef?"

"Oh, Feferi's in the bedroom," Egbert says. "We got caught in a random inspection, we had to stash her, and we've stashed _way_ bigger things than her before, she's not so bad. Or the inspectors aren't so thorough. Or Vriska bribed them? I wasn't paying attention." He shrugs. "They haven't caught us yet."

He's got a vision of Feferi tucked away in a crawlspace, terrified, and he banishes it. "This used to be a fighter, how the fuck did you get a bedroom in it?" The _Windfucker's_ bigger on the inside than any fighter Eridan's ever had the suspect pleasure of setting foot in. That just means there's more space for Vriska's mess -- trashy paperbacks and loose tools, enormous diamond-patterned coffee mugs, and underwear, everywhere. It's like she does it on purpose, the underwear, and she probably does.

"When a fighter and a cargo haul pity each other _very much,"_ Vriska says from the cockpit door, tossing Egbert a blanket for Rose, "and the drone shows up to take their genetic material, see where I'm going?"

Egbert beams with pride, then wraps the blanket around Rose's shoulders and lets her go, all in one motion. "Need something warm to drink?" he asks her. "Or you, Eridan?"

Behind Egbert, Vriska shakes her head hard, _no, don't drink it, for the love of fuck,_ and beckons Eridan into the cockpit. He stays right where he is. "I'm fine," he says.

"I shouldn't keep Feferi waiting." Rose flexes her fingers one at a time, one hand at a time, trying to get her feeble blood going. The blanket's made for Vriska-sized trolls. It swamps her, like the wiggler from the stories who spun her cocoon too big.

"No rush!" Egbert says, fixing her headband for her.

"I'm fine," she says. Without so much as a glance at him, Rose shoves the blanket into Eridan's arms and walks off with her nose in the air, into what'd be the gun turret on a normal fighter.

And he can't go in with her, in with _Feferi._ He folds the blanket up, ship-shape, and follows Vriska and John into the cockpit.

"You know you're bleeding, right? Like, you'd noticed?" Egbert says, once the door hisses shut behind them.

"Doesn't hurt," Eridan says, "it'll clear up in a few days."

Egbert pushes him down into one of the seats in the cockpit. "Too bad!" Vriska takes the other and keys something in on the control panel, gets them out farther away from the hiveship, then passes a whole medic's bag over Eridan's head, a battered, worn-out thing that looks like they nicked it straight from the front lines. They probably did. "Jacket off," says Egbert.

"Don't be shy," Vriska says, kicking her feet up. "He's not going to _eat_ you."

Eridan's met medics who could learn a thing or two from Egbert's disappointed little _I don't care how hurt you think you are, soldier_ stare. "Only if you die," he says, "I promise."

"Waste not," says Eridan, and shucks the glubbin jacket, if Egbert needs to patch him up so bad. The damage to his clothes is worse than the damage to his shoulder, for cod's sake. "Fuckin -- want not," he adds, and hisses like a recruit when Egbert starts cleaning the wound, like he's never been shot before.

"Vriska, how should I tie this?" Egbert puts compresses on either side of his shoulder, then starts folding up a triangle bandage. "Under the armpit, around the other side?"

Vriska swings her legs off the instrument panel and swivels to look over at them. "Yeah, sure."

"Sling?"

"I'm a fuckin seadweller, I don't need a sling."

"In case we forgot, John!" says Vriska. "All hail the mighty fishtroll, whose ass we just saved, by the way."

Tying off the bandage, Egbert pats Eridan's shoulder just a little too hard to be not making a point with it -- that he should be grateful, that he shouldn't talk back to Vriska, whatever, message received. "Good as new, see."

He's not going to ask where John Egbert learned how to clean and bandage so many kinds of wounds, just like he's not going to ask how the owners of a civilian vessel got their sticky hands on the kind of communications rig that can pick up military channels, or why. The cockpit window's reflective coating is rated to withstand close circumsolar orbit, and should've been stripped out when the fighter got decommissioned. He makes himself look away, massage the thudding ache in his shoulder, before either of them can notice him admiring their equipment.

Egbert takes up position behind Vriska and starts running his fingers through her hair, dissecting every snarl he finds with an awful, reverent patience Eridan can't stand to look at, or look away from. "Awful quiet back there," he says. "Why'd Fef want Lalonde, anyway?"

"Oh." Egbert looks like he's chewing on the inside of his cheek. "Just things, you know." Vriska shuts her eyes and lets her head drop back against his chest, and he pushes her up, because he's fixing her hair and because here, in the shadow of the hiveship, it's a mess of debris and waste. The perfect place for a couple of smuggler mechanics to hide out, and say they're just scrounging for parts.

"Spit it out," Vriska says, "it's fine."

"I don't think -- "

"I'm on your coddamn side," says Eridan, "not like I'm gonna skip off and spill it to my general."

Egbert runs his hands through Vriska's hair one last time, concentrating real hard on the fall of it. "It's, you know. The horrorterror thing, nothing to worry about." Then he braids her hair, fast, and lays the result over Vriska's shoulder for her approval. There's loops of hair sticking out, and he didn't split the sections even, and it's an awful mess but Vriska grins anyway.

"Which horrorterror thing," Eridan starts to say, when something smacks into the hull and jolts the whole ship. He's been in enough fighters to know to get the hell out of Egbert's seat, but instead Egbert zips his jumpsuit up to the neck.

"I'll go out and check," he says, cracking his knuckles and pressing the open button for the cockpit door. "You two hold down the fort!" Vriska tugs the front of Egbert's jumpsuit and he bends over so she can ruffle his hair, and then she slaps his ass on his way out, looking at Eridan the whole time.

It's nothing but showing off, the way Egbert steps from the airlock with no helmet on, nothing to help him but a pair of bright blue magnetic boots and his Breath powers. When the door closes, Vriska worries at her lower lip with one fang and steps out into the cargo hold, kicking things aside as she goes. Eridan takes one last look at the cockpit before following her.

"It's probably nothing," Vriska calls back over her shoulder. "We get hit by space junk all the time."

"'Cause you and Egbert fly this tin can through the worst parts of the fleet," Eridan says, sitting down on a pile of boxes covered in cheery, hand-knitted blankets. They give a little, but hold his weight.

"Yeah," Vriska says, cheerfully. "Where else are we going to find the people who'll buy what we're selling?"

"And what're you selling?"

"An empress." She picks up a pair of underwear, tosses it into a pile, picks up a book, does the same.

"You're selling Fef."

"The vision eightfold helps! A little. Oh, and there's this haul of really weird alien porn someone's paying us to deliver to the hiveship, don't pick those blankets up."

Eridan does not pick the blankets up.

The airlock door opens and Egbert slides back in, hair sticking up at angles. He's got a broken-off metal bit of something in his hands, big as his head. "This little guy got caught between the primary and secondary cannons," he says, "and wouldn't come out for anything -- "

Then the door to the gun turret swings open behind them with a low, metallic creak. Egbert's staring right at it, and whatever he sees there makes him go sallow at the temples, his mouth dropping open. Eridan spins on his heel, thinking _Feferi_ with a kind of blind panic. She's there. She's silhouetted in the doorframe. The light behind her is wrong, it's a sparking virulent white and the angles of it don't come from anywhere it should. It spills out around her bare feet and Eridan thinks of nothing but _science._

Rose is poised at Feferi's arm, the fingers of one hand pressed lightly to her wrist. A snarl of shadows drips from her fingertips and leaks in rivulets down the back of Feferi's hand and from there to the floor. She's gone a pale grey all over, like she's a troll who hasn't ever gone out after moonrise. She opens her mouth -- her lips are _black_ \-- and says something that bubbles, an ugly twist of admonishing syllables. The crawling light shudders into a deep grey flare and then retreats back into the room.

"Sorry for all the trouble," Feferi says, perfectly calm, like the Furthest Ring wasn't trying to sneak up on her ankles while she wasn't watching, "but we're done now, you can take us back to the hiveship." She's as far from him as starlight, _Commandant Peixes_ and _his Fef_ so indistinguishable Eridan can't find the line between them anymore. "Rose has some really great ideas."

The grey on Rose's face is draining slowly, dripping to pool in the hollows of her collarbones and darken there. Feferi turns to her and hugs her across the shoulders, gingerly. There's a crackle of blacklight when they touch, a sudden smell of ozone and algae-choked saltwater. Eridan takes a step forward.

"It's fine," Feferi goes on. "it's just like -- a reunion! Gl'bgolyb remembers her." She picks Rose's fingertips off her skin. "Gl'bgolyb remembers her _a lot."_

Egbert says, "Rose?"

Rose ignores him, she's looking straight at Eridan. Her eyes are still the same, violet as a seatroll's blood. She looks like she's about to be sick. It suits her fine.

"That's decided then," she says, her Alternian accented with something far more unpleasant than usual, and then she takes three hesitant steps away from Feferi and crumples like her strings have been cut.

Eridan catches her.


	3. Chapter 3

She isn't exactly unconscious. More accurately, she's _not listening,_ and between _not listening_ and _not talking back_ she doesn't have much attention to spare for niceties like voluntary movement. Echoes of the Furthest Ring loop endlessly in the corners of her mind. Eridan has his hands on her again, carrying her. They feel distant, a seascum-thin veil between her flesh and his palms. That veil is her flesh. She's a slow-dissolving horror, fading grey-to-pink. 

She slits her eyes open when he puts her down on Terezi's couch. He does it gently, insultingly, laying her out like she's made of soapbubble fragments. He notices her looking and wipes his face clear with a smirk. There'd been something like unwilling, ugly concern there before. Rose would like to slap him. Her hands are shaky. She's still all bubbling animal instinct, and instinct tells her she _has no need of her hands._ Instinct shows her Eridan as a blank-white light to be blotted out, left-over bits of angels in his blood.

Terezi gets to him first, which saves her the trouble.

The stretch of her cane is an extension of her arm, pointed end pressed into the soft place beneath Eridan's chin. Eridan stills, curls his lips back from his fangs, spreads his hands wide and empty. Behind them, Rose watches Dave flashstep out of the doorway of the respiteblock, his sword unsheathed and easy in his hand. He arrives at the side of the couch, near her head, and looks down at her. One of his eyebrows rises visible above his shades, even while he's got the most recent incarnation of Caledscratch angled at Eridan's chest. Rose feels, abruptly, like she's been caught _in flagrante._

"What did you do to her?" Terezi asks, brightly.

"Listen, _fuck,"_ Eridan says, "before you slit my throat with that glubbin thing, just hear me out."

The cane-tip doesn't waver. 

Rose marshals sufficient neuromuscular control to shove herself up on her elbows, in a grand show of not being either dead or entirely made of horrorterror shadows. Dave reaches out with his free hand and threads his fingers through her hair. She turns her cheek into his palm. He smells like _human,_ and _home;_ he's warm, but not warm enough. "Hey," Dave says. He drops the sword to his side, sits down next to her. Terrifying Eridan is Terezi's privilege, right now. "Fancy meeting you here, hombre."

She reaches for Alternian rather than festertongues, misses, comes up with English as a compromise. "Surely, we've met in stranger places, Mr. Strider." 

"Your explanation had better be excellent!" Terezi speaks Alternian for Eridan's benefit. He's never learned English, knows nothing but the curses. She draws her cane down his neck and around the side. It's almost sensuous. _Say the word, and I'll do it._

"Fef wanted to see her," Eridan says, _"Fef_ wanted to see her A-fuckin-SAP, so I drag her out of class, and then we get stopped by a pack of fuckin Praeterrors -- and they're watchin every single one of us -- so I get us out of it -- "

Rose lifts her head from Dave's shoulder and clears her throat. Eridan rolls his eyes at her, viciously, and corrects himself. "All right, so _Rose_ gets us somewhere safe, and Egbert and Vris pick us up, and then there's horrorterrors. Don't know how the glubbin horrorterrors got there. But Rose, here, she comes outta talkin with Fef in the middle of some bloodeldritch festerthroes the likes of which you ain't never _seen."_ He pauses, as though waiting for Rose to contradict him. She won't, not when he's enjoying himself so much. 

Besides, he's right. Eridan's never seen how much more there can be to the throes. She curls closer against Dave's side. Her fingers where they rest on the couch are nearly human-shade again; they merely look like she's contracted a bad case of frostbite.

"I coulda left her in an alley," Eridan is saying. "I brought her back here, safe and sound. Fuckin _considerate_ of me."

"Considerate," says Terezi. She rolls the word around on her tongue, testing it. Eridan tries to duck away from her cane. She doesn't let him. A narrow score of violet drips across his jaw.

"They were exceedingly stubborn throes," Rose cuts in, "in case anyone was curious."

"Look, I even got shot for her," he adds, gesturing at the blasted-open hole in the shoulder of his uniform, the bandages just visible beneath. He would have torn the wound open carrying her home. The place he bled on her shirt while they ran is crusted stiff and violet-black now, the blood still sticky and cold on her skin underneath.

"That is an approximately accurate account of the past few hours," says Rose, muffled, "and only minimally embellished." It is worth it for watching how _complex_ the violet-blush of embarrassment is, creeping across Eridan's cheeks, the filaments of his gillslits flushing. Rescued, and by _her,_ when he's been pretending so hard at being a hero.

Terezi lowers the cane, inch by fractional inch. Rose can hear Eridan's exhalation, see the line of tension across his chest subside.

Terezi grins at him. "Adjutant Ampora," she says, as polite as if he's just arrived. "How nice of you to bring Rose home! Now get out of my hivesuite."

"Not so fast, Pyrope," Eridan says. "We've got somethin to discuss, you and me."

"Do we," says Terezi.

"Feferi tell you that the world's about to end, or something? Anything we actually need to know?" Dave adds.

 _"Lalonde_ tells me," Eridan starts, and then Rose watches him glance at her on the couch, at the position of Terezi's cane in her fingers, at the halfblade of Dave's sword leaning against the armrest, and shift directions. "Rose said that she'd ask you about fetchin Captor back."

Terezi sighs and sticks the pointy end of the cane into the floor so that she can lean on it. "You could have said at the beginning that all your sneaking around was about Sollux," she says, patiently, as if he's the subject of a deadly tedious cross-examination. "You could have shown a little bit of discretion. The great Alternian military teaches that, doesn't it? Discretion?"

"You've met him," says Rose. "I'm sure an attempt was made, but beached itself and died on the shoals of his insatiable need for attention. It's a tragedy, really."

Eridan ignores her, _ostentatiously._ "That a yes or a no, Pyrope?" he says.

"I'll do it for Sollux," Terezi says. "Not for you, and not even for Feferi's very noble cause."

"Good enough," Eridan says. "I don't care what you're gonna do exactly, and I ain't gonna ask, but you should probably do it soon. Considerin her Condescension's schedule as of late."

"I work very fast, Eridan." Terezi folds her fingers on the dragonhead pommel of her cane and leans over it, smiling. "I have a _plan._ Don't you worry about it."

"What kinda plan?" he says, with just the thinnest edge of petulance to his voice.

Dave shakes his head. "You done here?" he asks. "'Cause I think you're done." Eridan bristles, opens his mouth to retort.

Rose takes it upon herself to cut him off at the pass. She shoves herself as vertical as she can manage, elbowing Dave gently in the side. "Thank you for bringing me home."

She might well have gargled sandpaper, for how husky it comes out. The effect is nearly post-coital. Eridan blanches, insofar as trolls are capable of blanching, and bares his teeth at her. Less a smile, more a blatant threat to her immediate well-being. "Ain't my fault you needed it," he says.

"Who said it was anyone's _fault?"_

"You don't weigh hardly anythin, it wasn't a trouble." _You're weak, and you disgust me._

"Don't get too used to it," she says. "I doubt you'll have any further opportunities."

"You _wish,_ Lalonde," Eridan starts. 

"Good day, Ampora," says Rose, "safe travels, bon voyage, au revoir -- " Terezi gestures, just slightly, with the cane.

"I'm goin, I'm goin," Eridan says, and heads for the door. The grace of his exit is marred somewhat by the squeaking of no less than three trod-upon scalemates strewn in his path. The fourth, he kicks out of his way. He glances back at the three of them to make sure they're not laughing, and they wait until the door hisses shut behind him to do so.

They sound good together. Easy. It doesn't last.

Rose makes a half-hearted attempt to wrench herself free of Dave's ever-contracting visegrip on her person. Her skin is pale again. If she squints, she can still see slivers of dark under her fingernails -- perhaps it's dirt. The cargo bay was dirty, after all, and Vriska's bedroom on the Windfucker, dirtier.

"I'm sorry John and I missed lunch," she says before either of them can speak, "did you and Jade have a good time?"

"Oh, yeah, it was great." Dave hefts her with considerably more effort than it had taken Eridan, and she nearly drifts off in the thirty seconds it takes the three of them to make their way into the respiteblock. "Got the good toy with my Troll Happy Meal. Made Jade do the Space thing and sneak us into a holofilm, you know how it is."

"I could have you arrested for that, Dave," says Terezi. She pulls the rumpled blankets up over Rose's shoulders when Dave sets her down, and then they slide into bed on either side of her. She winds up half on top of Dave, Terezi pressed into her back, which at the very least prevents her from curling up into a ball and clawing at her face, which is what feels appropriate at the moment. "Shame on you, breaking the law."

"I'm sure you'll punish him privately," Rose says.

Terezi's index claw draws circles around her bellybutton. "Unless you'd like to argue the defendant's case?"

"Ladies, come on," says Dave. "Rose, what'd Feferi want from you?"

The horrorterrors in the game had been gentle, compared to this; they'd needed her, and tried not to destroy her frail consciousness. She only operated in four dimensions, she was not capable of comprehending the sight of them, let alone the extent and depth of their appalling song-speech.

Gl'bgolyb had taken no such pains.

"Oh, good!" Feferi had said, stroking one of the slowly undulating tendrils of darkness that wrapped itself around her arm while Rose's skin went black, then lightened to dark, flat grey. "So you _can_ make contact with her!" 

It had been a funeral dirge written for a whole Empire's passing, sweet and sad and gentle enough to bring burning tears to Rose's eyes, that no one but her would ever hear this music. Gl'bgolyb had sung it in full once, in another timeline. She should like an occasion to sing it again.

But rather than tell Dave and Terezi, Rose says, "Well. Her Staggering Presumption, Commandant Feferi Peixes, by the grace of the Mother Grub, heiress apparent to the ten thousand stars of the Alternian Empire, lady of the silent deeps, the most cold, the keeper of the Rift's Carbuncle -- "

Dave flicks her nose, and the sting stops her babbling. "Yeah, yeah," he says, "the Princess of Whales, the Sultan of Swing."

 _"Sultana_ of Swing; precision is important, when speaking of royalty."

"Mind your manners, wigglers," Terezi murmurs. One of them ought to tell her to climb into her recuperacoon. She has stayed up far too late into the day, and will be the worse for it if she falls asleep in bed with them. Rose is too selfish.

"She sure as shit didn't invite you over for tea and crumpets," Dave says. "Spit it out."

"If you must know." Steeling herself, she shuts her eyes so that she doesn't look too deep into the shadows, at what may have followed her home. "It's quite simple, really. She wants me to scare the Condesce for her."

*

"Adjutant Ampora," General Ismene says, finishing her circuit of the room in front of Eridan.  
She's ignored him this whole visit to their office, slapping Vimsha on the wrist for getting lazy with her calculations, nodding indifferently at Gezlan's report. Making him sweat clear through his uniform. "Where were you headed when you ran from the Praeterrors?"

He clenches his jaw and makes himself count to three before he looks up at her, his bloodpusher pounding and ready to jump up his throat. This'll be the part where she flies into a rage, knocks half the papers off his desk, and then dismisses Vimsha and Gezlan so she can tear him to pieces -- he can only halfway hope those are some figurative pieces -- for shaming her. Instead, she picks up a half-finished report and leafs through it. 

"Caused them to draw firearms in civilian corridors." The General licks a finger, turns a page. "Created a public nuisance on no fewer than three decks. Spotted departing the _H.C.S. Windfucker_ yesterday morning. I'm sure you had an excellent reason, Adjutant, and I'd very much like to hear it."

Vimsha, behind her, looks like it's Twelfth Perigee's Eve come early. General Ismene's a heavy infantry thug made real good, and a ceruleanblood besides; when the _calm_ comes out that's when you've gotta be worried about her. Temper's easy.

"Well -- "

"And all of that in the company of the Rose Human." She sets the report on top of one of his piles and squares it with exaggerated care. "One of High Command's most valuable assets. You can't have known that, but it is -- unfortunate."

"Nothin happened to _her,"_ Eridan notes, "so I dunno what you mean by 'unfortunate.' An the rest of it's a misunderstanding -- they're the ones who opened fire, I didn't even draw my pistol. Besides, even if Her Condescension's about to land on our hiveship there's only so much a troll can take by way of baseless glubbin accusations from Her guardsmen -- I coulda challenged that Captain to a duel an been within my rights -- "

Eridan pauses to get another breath, and Vimsha fills the silence with slow applause. He ought to challenge _her_ to a duel. 

General Ismene doesn't bother to spare Vimsha a glance. She's got more important fish to gut, here. She gets real close to him, right behind his shoulder. "Baseless accusations, Adjutant? And what might those entail."

While Rose did the Light thing, the Praeterror captain had said: wasn't it suspicious, him coming so quick from the Heiress's hivesuite right after she'd been wounded? By the Condesce herself, no less? -- Wasn't it _just._ But that's the truth of the matter, and has exactly shit to do with what his General's probably been told.

"The Captain suggested I'd gone and absconded myself from a fight," he says, Not too revealing, not an outright lie. "Insulted me. I ain't that kinda coward." He's been practising this spin in his head since he'd rolled out of his recuperacoon this evening. That gets him a good snort from Gezlan, his first reminder that she's even in the room. 

"And then, once she'd as much as called you a coward, you decided to run from her." 

"Rose -- the Rose Human -- was gettin spooked. Fuckin terrified, all clingin to my arm. The Captain, she brought two seadwellers with her, what kinda alien wouldn't be scared?"

The General settles her hands on his shoulders and _squeezes,_ jerking his whole body forward. "The Rose Human was _scared,"_ she says. He stares off at a point above the door. "Really. Adjutant Vimsha, Adjutant Gezlan, you were both at the Conquering Day party. Have I confused my aliens? Two of them look very much alike, after all. All yellow."

"She didn't seem afraid," Gezlan says. He'd be grateful for her stepping in if she didn't expect him to look at her like a fucking troll Bodhisattva, standing in between him and whoever's pissed at him today. Usually Vimsha. If he wasn't subject to their daily flushcrush show, he'd think that she'd gone and decided she wanted to play auspistice. "Sounds like a load of hoofbeast shit, if you ask me." She coughs into her hand, trying to play innocuous like it'll fool someone; _excuse my language, General._

"And your load of steaming hoofbeast shit made me look bad, Adjutant, did you stop to think about that? Did you think about our regiment riding in the van in next perigee's campaign?" General Ismene shakes him again, so hard his teeth rattle, then walks around the front of the desk. "I _should_ hand you over to the Praeterrors. They'd strip you down to your neurons and use them as processors in Her Condescension's ship. Did you stop to think about that?" 

She gives him a second to think that over, good and hard. Nice and vivid. They scare recruits with what makes the Condesce's ship run so nice.

"I keep you around for a reason, Ampora," she adds. 

And it sure as hell isn't his pretty face. The game had given them a choice, and they'd picked the trolls' universe. Because it was an asshole, it spat them out in vacuum right outside High Command's big old picture window. He'd woken up to a bunch of generals and tacticians peering down at them, real curious as to how twelve kids, not a one of them at conscription age yet, had gotten onto the hiveship. That, and why they'd brought along snacks. 

While Karkat shouted about _they're our fucking friends, you miserable proto-sentient crotchstains,_ Feferi'd cut her palm open to let them see her blood color, which smoothed over damn near everything. Half the generals had just about genuflected when they saw her. The lot of them got covered up, buried deep down in the fleet's Weird Space Shit files, right under the Starving Nebula and a few raving reports on planetary consciousnesses. (He'd looked them up. He's got the clearance, he might as well abuse it.)

Being one of those twelve -- and his pretty face, and his staggering personal merit, and his goddamn magnificent record of breathtaking, bulgeclenching bravery in battle -- is why he has this job. He's a nice vase General Ismene keeps around the hivesuite, something to trot out at parties. 

The General repeats, "For a _reason,"_ like he didn't catch the hint the first time. "I'm not going to hand you over to the Praeterrors. But I can't have you going into battle with me -- don't argue." Eridan bites his tongue. "What do I do with you, then?"

She's looking at him, but the question's directed over her shoulder. She's giving him to Gezlan and Vimsha to punish. He wishes she'd just demoted him.

"Uninhabitables sent you a report, General," Vimsha says, pulling a file from far enough down in her stack that he can almost believe she didn't have it at hand on purpose. "The terraforming survey? When I cross-referenced it with the last one they sent -- well, their personnel numbers seemed off. Lower than they ought to be. I think someone should be sent to inspect it, don't you?"

"Terraforming," General Ismene says, like she's actually considering it. "Ampora, what do you know about terraforming."

Eridan knows nothing about terraforming that he didn't get out of three weeks of geophysical sciences back in officer training, which is just enough to know he doesn't want to know any more about it, but he says, "Tricky business, terraforming," like taking apart planets and putting them back together different is what he thinks about on his downtime. "All sorts a ways it can go wrong."

"Accidents happen," says Vimsha.

Eridan smiles at her with every tooth he's got. "But not this many accidents, is that what your report's sayin?" 

The General claps her hands, rubs them together, and the two of them look up at her. "Excellent. Ampora, you will go find out why there are personnel discrepancies on whatever planet Vimsha's talking about; someone has to do it and it will keep you safely out of my hair until the Praeterrors forget that you're a fucking _security risk."_

"Ma'am," he says. All he can do now is stand up and salute, stomach twisted up in a knot at the contempt in her voice. 

"You leave -- four nights from now. Wouldn't want you to miss the parade," General Ismene adds, just to drive it in; Vimsha's smirk is the nastiest thing he's seen since Rose's little tirade about _black romance._

He'll find the shuttle assignment on his door tomorrow evening, and Gezlan and Vimsha''ll be laughing all the way to the front lines, off to win glory in battle while he plays bureaucrat. In response to some signal Eridan misses, his co-adjutants gather their things and make to follow General Ismene out of the room. It's Gezlan who pauses in front of his desk and holds her hand out. 

"I'll take your diagrams," she says. "The troop movements." 

"An say you came up with them, most like." 

"Not if they're terrible," Vimsha says from the doorway, glancing out into the hall. "We'll just blame you."

"That's glubbin low. Even for you --"

"Just give them to us; _you_ won't be needing them, will you? Not where you're going." 

There's nothing he can do or say that won't put him farther down Ismene's shitlist, and so there's no point in being difficult about it. He waits until they're gone to shut his eyes and slump over his desk, pinching the bridge of his nose. A terraforming station -- it can't be that bad. Nice vacation from High Command politics. Keep his eyes peeled for whatever's happening to the crew, catch up on work, get some reading done. 

He hasn't sold Feferi out. He's kept her safe. It's not enough.

*

Legislacerator parties are, if not _better_ or _more pleasant_ than High Command parties, then at least more colorful. _Colorful_ is putting it gently. The crowd of Neophytes and Novices here are all competing before their superiors to outdo one another in garishness as much as volume. Rose's eyes have been hurting for the past half-hour.

It's an annual affair, and reminiscent of an office Christmas party. If office Christmas parties featured people standing on their chairs and declaiming at length about the glory of The Empire, their moral positions, and their moral positions on the glory of The Empire. More rarely, a Novice or a Neophyte will attempt to bring a pet cause to the attention of their superiors, that the might of the Cruellest Bar might be brought to bear on it.

This evening, however, they are not so lucky. It is a panoply of panegyric. Endless encomia. Terezi does not slouch in the middle of her group of friends, but her drink is half-empty and neglected and she fiddles with the dragon's head on her cane before speaking.

Ever-dutiful, Rose fetches her another drink. When she hands it over, Terezi's acquaintances stare at her for longer than is polite, more because she isn't Dave than because of her obvious alienness. "If I have to hear another speech on the majesty of Her Imperious Condescension," Terezi says, as softly as she can manage, "I'm going to _scream._ There is only so much you can say before you run out of ways to describe her tentacular tresses and mighty fleet!" 

Solemn, nodding agreement from all assembled. The next speaker climbs up on a table, rather than a chair, and nearly upsets the punch bowl. He does upset the arrayed cutlery beside it. This more than anything makes the crowd pay attention; the trolls near the table jerk forward in one movement to catch the spilling utensils before they fall. The bowl itself, already well-loved, acquires a few more chips along its rim from the psionics in the audience contributing to the effort.

Once the speaker and punch-bowl are both as stable as they are going to get, he nods out at the crowd and begins. This speech, too, is on the Condesce's magnificence, this time with an eye toward The Law rather than The Empire, and Terezi cackles quietly to her friends. "I wonder why the theme this evening," she says. "Any guesses?" 

The room is hung about with the Condesce's banners, every surface slathered in as much white and Tyrian purple as the Legislacerative Decoragitating Committee can manage, which is, apparently, quite a lot. Wisely, the speaker -- a Novice Legislacerator in something neon-aqua-and-red, as hideous as it is skintight -- has positioned himself in front of the largest and most intricate of the trident-covered tapestries, lest anyone forget at whom he's directing his praises. 

Rose wanders off before Terezi's group can start heckling amongst themselves: Aqua-Spandex's delivery is stentorian in its best moments, piercing in its worst. Terezi will want a fresh drink after she's listened to it, and Rose has more than half a mind to see if there is any variety of Alternian liquor that will at least _attempt_ to alter her perceptions -- though after seven years she suspects she has tried them all, and will be forced to imbibe something based on taste alone.

There's a troll in pristine black High Command uniform patrolling the open bar with the solemnity and poise of the mildly intoxicated. Rose has a long moment of deja vu before noticing decisively that this troll has incurving, hooked horns, suitable for goring soft underbellies. She is also an indigoblood, and female, and in fact Adjutant Gezlan. One of Eridan's deskmates. She raises a glass of something effervescently pink with an umbrella and a straw in Rose's direction, one eyebrow quirked up.

Rose nods to her. "Gezlan. I hardly expected to see anyone of your rank outside of your office; aren't you all scrambling to prepare for the grand procession and reception?" 

One Adjutant is bad enough. If Gezlan has somehow brought Eridan along, like a persistent remora clinging to the heel of the nearest available social interaction, all of Terezi's delicate plans for the evening will go awry. Eridan is incapable of keeping himself out of anything, unless it's someone's trousers, in which case he's incapable of getting himself _in._

"We are," says Gezlan, "but I got the morning off. My moirail's giving a speech."

"Who's your moirail?"

She points at Aqua-Spandex, which forces Rose to downgrade her opinion of Gezlan's taste. She ought to have known, from the fizzy drink if nothing else. "Told him to just wear the tabard," she says. "You know how it is."

"Yes," Rose says. Visions of dragon-head epaulets dance through her head. "Yes, I do."

"Who're you with?" Gezlan asks. She picks up a drink and offers it to Rose. It's a Legislacerator favorite, a sort of green troll vodka that tastes like the shriek of a dehydrated baby velociraptor. Rose does her best not to physically recoil from the sight of it. Gezlan peers at her. "Oh, so you can't -- "

"Get drunk, no." Gezlan's moirail veers into piercing again, and both she and Gezlan flinch. "Unfortunate physiological differences."

"Yeah?" 

"I'm not going to detail them for you," says Rose, sharper than she ought. "I'm with Neophyte Pyrope; she's my moirail's matesprit." The lie comes out smooth, these days. All she and Dave have to do is abstain from overtly sexual public expressions of physical affection, and the social order remains _ordered._ Much like it would have been for them on Earth, had they made that choice.

Gezlan takes a long, devoted sip of her drink. She is two steps down Inebriation Lane, headed toward the intersection with Utterly Smashed Street. Rose would be too, if her moirail was atop a table dressed as a spare Power Ranger. "Speaking of quadrants," says Gezlan.

"If this is about Eridan, I don't want to hear it." Adjutant Ampora, she should have used his _title._ Gezlan's face lights up with amusement. 

"I was just going to say." Gezlan takes another sip. "Whatever stunt you and he pulled got him in pretty deep shit."

 _"How_ deep." 

"Getting sent off to Terraforming Hellstation Fucknowhere to watch paint dry in three days' time, deep. Might wanna lord it over him, is what I'm saying." Setting her empty glass on the drink table, Gezlan gives her Aqua-Spandex a sidelong glance. "Not gonna be seeing him for a _while's_ what I'm saying." 

"What a tragedy," Rose says, and has neither the time nor the energy to examine just how that makes her feel. "Really, how do I live without him. How will I ever survive." A lurid image of John and Vriska in matching, dirtied wifebeaters at the helm of the _Windfucker_ pops up in her head. It is actually a welcome distraction. "Thank you for telling me, Adjutant Gezlan."

"Call me Sellia," Gezlan says, clapping Rose about the shoulders hard enough to make her stumble. 

"Then thank you, Sellia." 

Rather than outright saying _And send him off with a bang, for fuck's sake,_ Gezlan has the drunken grace to nod knowingly, then swans off into the crowd to add her hands to the smattering of applause for Aqua-Spandex. He bows, then hops off the table and straight into the spilled cutlery. 

"Oh," he says, grinning sheepishly as Gezlan rushes forward to help him pick his way over it. "Sorry about the forks!" 

The resultant chuckle ruins any impact his speech may have made. Rose finds herself in the center of the mill of trolls; they separate into little legislacerative knots, dissecting the speech like an entire cutlery drawer of knifeblade tongues. Terezi is abruptly at her elbow, narrow fingers digging comfortingly into the flesh of her arm.

Rose turns to her. She is grinning, wide and even. In her hand is the last drink Rose had brought her, still full nearly to the brim with swirls of red troll grenadine. She hasn't touched a drop. "I think," she says, "that it is time for a venture into the wordkind fray! It will begin to look bad if I neglect to be impressive."

"Now?" Rose asks.

Terezi's eyes glitter as red as her drink. "Is it possible that you're _nervous,_ Rose?" she says. 

"Nothing of the kind."

"Perjury, and with all the court assembled," Terezi tells her, with no small amount of glee.

Rose plucks the drink from her hand, holds it with her fingers cupped delicately around the stem, like her mother would hold a martini glass. "Merely conscious of the ultimate goals of our actions, and the necessity of success."

Terezi snorts. "This is hardly more than a schoolfeeding exercise. Your part is easy!" She tilts her head, inhales like she's looking Rose over. "Just pretend you're Eridan."

"Arrogant, pathetic, and misinformed?" Rose says. "And terribly dressed."

That gets her nothing less than a tender, understanding pat on the arm: yes, my sticky grub-dumpling, you're caught in a swirling vortex of black passion for him, we understand. We are baffled, but we understand. Rose does not stoop to acknowledge the accusation, this time. "You be the seadweller," Terezi says, "I'll do the rest." 

As Rose understands it, the Seadweller Rube is a classic role in the grand tradition of troll dialectic. She is arrogant and pathetic and misinformed, and therefore must be brought into knowledge of the law. Terezi eases the two of them into the center of the room, then knocks a Neophyte attempting to climb up onto a chair down with a well-placed cane-blow to the back of the knees. 

"These speeches go on _forever,"_ Rose says, loud enough to carry. Eridan's tone, bored and more than a bit desperate for attention, is nearly effortless to reproduce, which suggests she ought to go spend a perigee in solitary confinement so as to detox. "They all say the same thing, what's the point?"

Terezi turns to her like she's a stranger, her mouth a perfect moue of annoyance. "Wordkind strife is an ancient art, Miss Lalonde," she asserts. "They display the talent of the legislacerator at being _convincing,_ which is exceedingly important to the proper execution of legal procedure." She pauses, exhales a tiny sigh. "Though so many iterations of the same phrases do get exceedingly tedious!"

"Well." Rose smoothes her hands down the front of her dress, out to where the skirt flares in white and almost-rose-red crinolines. Some of the panels are nearly seadweller-purple. If she was a troll she'd be edging up to the line of being arrestable for _impersonating a bloodcaste not her own._ They have the attention of everyone in their immediate area, mostly Neophytes and Novices, but not a single Judiciator. Yet. "If they're all saying the same thing, and you can hardly listen to it, how can you tell they're any good?" 

Terezi looks as if she is only not rolling her eyes out of sheer politesse. It is very similar to the look she wears when Rose and Dave get started on one another, and not in any way Terezi enjoys watching. "Through the skill by which the legislacerator employs her argumentation," she says snippily, "as well as by the referents of said argumentation to the tenets of Alternian Law, whether culling, court, or ceremonial."

"The law, and only the law, is enough to make the speech worthwhile? I would think that a modicum of grace on the courtblock ought to be a minimum requirement." 

"For?"

Her shrug is pure Eridan. Consequences are for other people, and she needn't be concerned with matters as trivial as _legality._ "For not boring me at parties."

"Miss Lalonde," Terezi says, "be _specific."_

"Grace, then, your honor -- "

"Wrong!" 

"Your worship?"

"Nope."

"Your majesty?"

"Your _tyranny."_

 _That_ has the room watching, or enough of it to make the jitters in Rose's stomach turn ecstatic. Not a few Novices look faintly irritated at her mockery of their superiors' grand title. "Very well; grace, your _tyranny,_ is speaking pleasantly and entertainingly, with poise and attention to appropriate material for the level of one's audience." The last she throws in for the sake of imitating the most irritating sort of highblood. It goes over with knowing inhalations and a few titters from the crowd; she could smirk. She does. A seadweller would.

Terezi smirks back. She's been pacing a small half-arc from Rose's side to directly in front of her; now she pauses, leans forward over her cane, drops her voice a quarter-tone into something insinuating. "True, true, and also true, and nevertheless missing the point. Grace as described could be easily employed to treasonous ends!"

"We wouldn't want that," Rose says, sotto voce.

"No," Terezi agrees, much louder. "We wouldn't! That would be _illegal."_

"You're being ridiculous, Terezi, a skill is a skill no matter what it does." She sweeps her gaze out over the crowd. "Think of psionics -- they do things with their minds, and thus, they aren't culled. The fact that they can do things is neither good nor bad."

Terezi's grin cracks open like an earthquake fissure. She touches the tip of her tongue to her teeth, a flash of teal on white. "Aha! A psionic. Psionics are an _excellent_ example of just what we're discussing. Do tell me, Miss Lalonde, what is a psionic good for?"

"One stacks them up when they die in battle -- you make a shield, kind of," Rose says. Eridan's words, not hers. She bites her tongue to keep from apologizing at the stricken look that flits across Terezi's face, never mind the lowblood legislacerators in the audience. The fact that she's still standing, however, is as good an indicator as any that she and Terezi are entertaining. 

"Dying for the Empire's a skill," Terezi says, vicious for a moment, "but that use of psionics is hardly proper employment, and thus practically illegal."

"I fail to see _how_ it's illegal." A greenblood Neophyte clears her throat to interrupt, only to be elbowed unceremoniously in it by the Judiciator next to her. 

"While it gives me deep pains in my toxin-filtration sacs to make an analogy to the noblest art of panegyric wordstrife under these circumstances, perhaps it will help you understand," says Terezi. Rose is giddily impressed; Terezi spat that out with a completely straight face. "If a skilled and accredited legislacerator appeared in public, attracted the attention of a crowd, and then spoke about a useless topic at _extreme length_ \-- taking up the time and auricles of Alternian citizens who could be listening to an encomium on Her Imperious Condescension, perhaps --"

Some unfortunate laughs out loud. 

There's a yawning, horrified silence, and then the smooth noise of an unsheathed swordcane in the hands of a Senior Legislacerator. "Treason," the Senior says, sharp in the quiet; Rose doesn't turn her head away from Terezi's eyes, not even when the crowd parts to let the Senior grab the laugher by his throat. Not a one of the trolls so much as blinks, or turns their head to watch the unfortunate party struggling and screaming as he's dragged away.

An uncomfortable pause ensues.

Terezi clears her throat. Rose is close enough that she can see tension-tremors in her hands where she grips her cane, but her face is merely annoyed, merely frustrated at being so rudely interrupted. The weight of all the trollish eyes on them both is suddenly hungry. Terezi's a half-step from _treason!_ herself and everyone in the crowd knows it; they are waiting to see what she'll do.

"A troll who wastes their talents is a burden on the species," Terezi says, chill and distant. "We are an imperial race. Burdens are culled."

It's close to a quotation from some great text -- Troll Pericles in Troll Thucydides, god knows Rose has heard it enough, though never quite so fervently in Terezi's mouth. Were they not the subject of dozens of stares, Rose would kiss her upturned nose and have Dave do the same, just to get her to laugh, to be _their Terezi,_ not a vicious highblood Legislacerator -- 

"Oh, of course," Rose manages. "Naturally, even _I_ can see that." 

Terezi takes a step closer. "Can you?" she says, gently. "Do you, Miss Lalonde?"

"Neophyte Pyrope, you've been indoctrinating me for sweeps and sweeps, you can't have failed to make an impression." A few eyebrows raise at that, which means _something_ is going the way she'd intended. 

"If I've made such an impression," Terezi says, "tell me: does such a legislacerator, one who _wastes our time_ \-- is he using the abilities granted to him by the sacred law of Alternia _well?_ Or not?" She sounds slightly, possibly relieved to have returned to the topic at hand. 

Rose attempts to stop her heartbeat from racing. It doesn't work. "Obviously not," she says. Then she raises her chin, flings her shoulders back, and imagines what gillslits on the sides of her throat would feel like. She gets on with it. "He should probably be culled."

Terezi's smiling at her: a small smile, secretly pleased, an expression Rose hardly sees except when Terezi's fixated on Dave and doesn't remember Rose is watching them both. "Because," she says, "that legislacerator is wasting a power that could have benefited the Empire?"

"Oh, yes. And being tedious, besides."

Terezi laughs. "Now, Miss Lalonde, imagine something less exalted than a member of the Cruellest Bar! Perhaps -- oh, a scienterrorist, who constructs a brand new sort of engine. This engine is light! It's small! It can be adapted to fit in any ship in the fleet, and lasts for hundreds of sweeps, and runs off cheap fuel! No psionics need die horribly to power it." 

She's practically rhapsodic. Rose imagines Jade blinking in and out of space wherever she wants to go, rather than certain incidents involving engines that Terezi could not possibly know of. Terezi goes on, asking, "Was that a good use of the scienterrorist's skill? Or not?"

"A worthy one, certainly; even an _impressive_ one."

"Because instead of building something frivolous, like a robot one can wrestle with, she built a machine which will advance the glory of the Empire?"

"Yes, as you say, O Your Tyranny." That gets smiles from the audience. There are few things more frightening than a room full of smiling legislacerators; fortunately, Rose has faced down most of them and lived to tell the tale. Nonetheless, she adjusts her skirts, to have something to do with her hands. It's good to see the Seadweller Rube out of her intellectual depth, fidgety and off-balance.

"Now suppose," Terezi continues, "that this excellent engine is put in the fastest, deadliest ship of the fleet! After Her Condescension's, of course. And when that ship is sent to the front line, it is given over to the care of a field engineer. But! That engineer does not maintain the engine, and in a moment of great importance, like the conquest of a new planet, it malfunctions and fails. Has he used his skill well for the advancement of the Empire?

"Absolutely not. Is he to be hanged, or gutted?"

"Hanging is traditional," Terezi says. "He has wasted a vital asset, has he not?"

"Quite so. Much like our dear orator, who, for no reason other than sheer vacuity -- "

"The _point,_ Miss Lalonde!"

Rose takes a deep breath. Perhaps she's laying it on, but these are legislacerators enjoying a show: they would not be considered overdramatic if they broke out into a choreographed song-and-dance routine on troll tort law, for heaven's sake. "Both the engineer and the orator should be culled immediately."

Terezi ceases her pacing and spins on the balls of her feet, facing the audience behind Rose. She spreads her hands, fingers separated and claws extended, like she is about to pounce. "Can we then agree that it is the duty of a good citizen of Alternia to ensure _not only_ the best possible use of her own particular skill, _but also_ the skills of those citizens and objects around her?"

"Yes, Neophyte Pyrope," Rose says, all earnest schoolgirlish agreement.

Cheerfully, Terezi says, "Oh good!" and pats Rose on the cheek. Rose manages to neither flinch nor lean in. "Now, we were discussing psionics."

"Let me try, then: if psionics serve the Empire, then they ought to be exploited to the absolute limits of their abilities. Otherwise both they and their supervisors really should be culled, for everyone's sake."

"So, for example -- the Twenty-Seventh Hivefleet. Weren't we talking about them earlier today?" From the corner of Rose's eye, she sees a Judiciator lean over to whisper to another. The one being whispered to smiles and nods her approval, and the Neophytes ringing them pick up on their cue. It spreads like a ripple through the audience around them; they're enjoying the show, all treason forgotten. "Tell the court, Miss Lalonde! What is happening in the Twenty-Seventh?"

"As I've heard" -- as she'd used Feferi's clearance to discover the intimate details of -- "they evacuated all of their civilians ages ago to other, safer fleets. The death rate is higher than optimal, and there isn't a legislacerator for light-years."

"However: the death rate isn't of interest to us. Soldiers die all the time, we needn't concern ourselves. What we're interested in is the _burn-out_ rate. How long should the average psionic last under normal combat conditions?"

"Before they're too damaged to function, and are brought back as spare parts?"

"Tell the court, Rose."

"WelI, I've heard that it depends on where they're deployed, and of course their blood color. A rustblood wears out faster than a fudgeblood," she says, and scans the audience, quickly, only to see that the slurs have passed over everyone's heads. She regrets saying them, if no one is going to notice how well she plays the highblood. She ought to regret saying them for any reason at all. "For all that the average rustblood is more powerful by an order of magnitude." 

Terezi gives Rose's bare shoulder a sharp nudge with her staff. "Don't be fiddly."

"Call it seven sweeps, then. "

"And in the Twenty-Seventh?"

She makes a great show of wincing. _"Considerably_ fewer. Conditions in the Twenty-Seventh are hardly normal; they haven't had relief, one hears, in nearly two sweeps. Even the most resilient of goldbloods would snap, to say nothing of the more frail breeds of psychic."

"And -- does this strike you as acceptable?"

At the crux of it, getting Sollux Captor back is a resource management problem. It's nothing but supply lines and power games -- whether the Cruellest Bar is powerful enough to overrule High Command on a matter of logistics. 

Rose calls up Eridan at his most dismissive, holds her shoulders square and her head up like she's daring the world to punch her in the jaw like she deserves. "It isn't as though the Empire will run out of psionics any time soon. They're nothing but convenient cannon fodder, what could possibly make any one regiment more special than the other? What's one more war of attrition?"

Terezi doesn't flinch. She settles back on herself instead, like Rose had asked her a very interesting question she hadn't fully considered. "If you look at the mission reports," she says, "if you look very closely, someone out there is a genius. Someone's solving problems no one else has even realized are problems! The Twenty-Seventh have survived, even _with_ their burn-out rate so high. But we are still wasting them! And haven't we agreed that negligence -- the negligence that leads to wasted resources -- is a cullable offense?"

The argument hardly hinges on Rose's next words: the Rube is vanquished, Terezi has lifted her intellectual shirt, flashed her rhetorical skills for the whole room to see, and any further display of oratory this evening would need fireworks and two brass bands to top the two of them. "If you insist," she says. "I suppose you're correct." 

"The _law_ is correct," Terezi says. "We are so fixated on what we expect a lowblood to be able to do that we've neglected to employ their skill to the deepest of its abilities. This is our problem. One of these days we are going to get a nasty surprise, and it will be because we've allowed skill to atrophy when it could have been --" She pauses, takes a long, slow breath, as if she is reminding herself what she's supposed to be arguing. "What fixed our Empire."

It's over. The crowd splinters again to discuss their speech, and the two Judiciators Rose noted earlier approach through the crowd. Their Neophytes follow them, and their Neophytes' Novices follow _them,_ then back off a respectable distance from Terezi. The Judiciators descend on her, one to each side, murmuring approving expressions of interest. Rose catches _some minor missteps, but that was quite original, Neophyte_ and _we didn't expect to hear anything of consequence at this gathering, but you've taken up this backwater regiment's cause, have you?_

Politics and sheer bravura: they've managed it. Something will happen now. 

Rose catches Gezlan's eye through the crowd, and seizes on the excuse to storm off in an ostensible huff. Let Terezi have the accolades she deserves, for that performance -- let her maneuver the other Legislacerators into making a play for the recall of the 27th. 

And now, for her other promise to Feferi. "Adjutant Gezlan," she says, settling against the wall propping Gezlan's drunken form up. Gezlan's moirail is nowhere to be seen, and is, in any event, likely to only be remembered as the Novice who nearly knocked the punch bowl over before Neophyte Pyrope and her alien stole the party. "Sellia. I've been wondering for _perigees_ \-- how does one get to the highest point on the hiveship?"

*

A few poor assholes on the other side of Deck 1 showed up in their whites. They're bunched together in a shoal of poor decisions, trying to be inconspicuous, which makes Eridan feel about a frond's length better about his life and his dress sense. He's starched up to the gills in his best black dress uniform, gold epaulets with _violet_ tassels made special, in case either of his co-adjutants forget who's the seadweller here.

It's the first time the fleet's had an actual empress in its ceremonial in most lowbloods' living memories. On the lower decks, where they can only see the parade happening on viewscreens, there's parties and booze. Not up here. Only High Command and its disciplined regiment of kiss-asses are allowed up on the top deck during the Empress's parade. The seadweller generals -- every one of them near five hundred sweeps -- form another shoal at the center of the room. A very bored one. The parade's been going on most of the night; the tenth formation is a procession of the biggest, fattest cargo vessels the Ninth has to show off, full of ore and captive aliens and probably trumpeting the imperial anthem off into the void. 

"And I swear on the Mother Grub's pustules," Gezlan says under her breath and mostly to Vimsha, "every single pustule, the High Admiral's asleep on her feet, look at her." 

It's not a matter of them remembering he's a seadweller, though, it's a matter of them giving a fuck. 

Eridan unmoors himself from them and drifts through the crowd. General Ismene's by the coffee, talking to two highblood admirals and a Judiciator, bright in his prosecutitioner's tabard. She's not looking at him, so he doesn't salute. 

Nobody wants to be close to the edge of the room. Deck 1 is the only place on the hiveship a troll can see space unbounded by walls, just glass and forceshield separating them from the vacuum. The fleet's drifting between star systems now, the whole great machine -- hundreds of repair skiffs, troop transports, fighter carriers, a whole civilization's worth of military replicated the galaxy over -- is stopped dead in its tracks to pay homage to one little ship, hovering right above their heads. 

_Right_ over their heads. Her Imperious Condescension's flagship is stationary above them like an extra jewel pasted atop a scepter, presiding over the ceremonies. He glances up at it in case anybody notices he's trying not to look. Her ship's nothing but a bright red trident with a bunch more tridents stuck on for good measure. It's elegant and gaudy at the same time, all pretty wrapping for what's sitting inside it, ancient and fuckin eternal. Her Condescension'd make any ship a weapon turned out at the galaxy. Her Condescension makes _everything_ weapons. 

A flash of cerulean on black, and Vriska Serket shoulders him out of the way despite the clear three feet of space on either side of him. "Quit hogging the window, asshole," she says, 

He hasn't got it in him to shove her back, not now. "Need something, Vris?" he asks, and he can't help but tack on, "A favor? I ain't exactly in the position to get you one."

Her cheeks are flushed blue from the zero-grav acrobatics the fighters in her leg of the procession went through, and hell if Eridan knows how the Windfucker survived them. "Come _on,_ like I'd need your help getting something I wanted." She taps her eye. "I just thought I'd say hello! Before you get shipped off to the stars. Terraforming mission? Leaving on the H.C.S. _Frilly Splattergarment,_ two days from now? It's in dry dock, or you'd be gone."

"Fuck off."

"I know, that's the worst nickname, right? The captain _hates_ it, but he's got to put up with it because he's a bigger asshole on his own than all of us put together, and the _Prime Mover's_ the best repair ship in the fleet! " 

Even for Vriska, that's babbling. She's scared shitless and she's got something to tell him that she can't say right out, not with the Condesce hovering on their horns. "Who invited you?" he says.

"Senior Specialist Tierol, you know, the chief of the _Prime Mover?_ Called me up here to congratulate me on my flying. Hey, at least one of us can do something right, between you and me." 

But the chief's moved on, to talk to the adjutants who came in their whites. Vriska stays exactly where she is, glued to the glass. "You gonna go back over to him?" he asks.

She shrugs. "I see him every day. Come on, let's get out of here. The good parades are over, everyone's too drunk to care."

There's a dozen good reasons to tell her to glub off and two dozen even better ones to turn her in for sedition. Just because he hasn't sold Feferi out doesn't mean he has an obligation to Vriska, except for the part where -- some long-unused qualms rear their heads and kick him in the fronds -- he _does._

"On the lower decks, maybe," says Eridan. "Drier than a fuckin beach up here."

"You High Command jerks are so boring," she says, as they descend the stairs. No elevator service from Decks 3 to 1, and it's a pain in the ass to get up and probably worse to get down. And that, General Ismene explained to Eridan's whole office once, is why there's no drinking, so half the top crust of the military doesn't fall down the stairs and break their necks. "Someone in that party could've died, but the starch in the uniforms would've kept them standing for a week, holy crap."

"And if there were any more wrinkles in your uniform, it'd -- collapse in on itself. Black hole. Take out half the coddamn hiveship before psionics plugged it up." 

Vriska snorts. It's nothing but absent-minded sniping, left over from when they were kids playing war games, before either of them knew what war was. It's stopped being comforting. 

Deck 5 is where the hiveship widens out enough that the starboard-port distinction matters again. Vriska ducks them into a deserted lowblood café, way off on starboard side. The rustblood behind the counter acknowledges their existence with a yawn and a wave, too tired or too used to High Command coming around to give a damn that he's got a seadweller in his shop, let alone be frightened of him. Vriska orders a massive, steaming cup of coffee with a shot of watered-down sopor in it and sits in an armchair, her feet up on a stool she'd dragged over with great, weary ceremony.

There's a spring loose in the couch Eridan takes. It digs into his ass every time he tries to sit upright, but slouching in front of Vriska would violate most of the principles he cares enough about to uphold and a couple of the ones he doesn't. 

"He's not listening," she says. She slurps when she sips, probably just to make him cringe. "I never met a maroonblood the vision eightfold didn't work on."

"That so."

Vriska doesn't even blink. "He thinks the place is still deserted! So, down to business."

"Business," Eridan says. "What's our business, again?" 

"Feferi's our business, why else would I be talking to you?" 

Eridan's got to stop having conversations about Fef in cafes, he's starting to feel like he's in a shitty seditious art film about the Summoner's rebellion, or that _Hivefleet Potemkin_ remake that flopped and got both its director and cinematographer culled last perigee. Vriska looks the part. She's disheveled and pinched. 

"What _about_ Fef," he says.

Vriska leans her chin on the heel of her hand. "Your _princess_ has almost as many irons in the fire as me, is what _about_ Fef," she says. Vriska's always taken him seriously about Feferi, practically the only one who did. "Guess what she told John."

"You can enlighten me any glubbin night now." 

A lone colonel wanders by the window. Eridan follows her with his eyes until she's out of sight. If they get caught here, he's not about to shove his tongue down Vriska's throat to get out of it, like he tried with Rose; first off, it wouldn't work, and besides, he's kissed Vris before. Had his share of _that_ when they were wrigglers, too, along with the wargames. She couldn't kiss for all the clams in the ocean.

Vriska glances at the rustblood like the guy's going somewhere. "Don't be rude, I don't have to tell you a thing, not if she hasn't told you herself. Which she hasn't. _I_ wouldn't trust you farther than I could throw you, either."

 _You made your point,_ he damn near says, _I'm a piece of_ shit, _now fuckin tell me what you dragged me out of a perfectly awful party to tell me._ But he's played this game with Vriska since they weren't higher than her lusus's first knee-joint. Any move he makes, she'll think she's got him running.

"Anyway," Vriska says, once she's drained half her mug. "The princess has a plan. A big, fat plan, to get the old witch off her back for a few more sweeps. Heard any of this? No, don't try and tell me, _hey Vris maybe I have, you ever think of that, maybe Fef tells me every damn thing, maybe I got sources you ain't imagined in your wildest glubbin dreams"_ \-- it's deliberately bad, her impression, all the _v_ s and _w_ s dragged out to the point where it sounds more ridiculous than he ever might have -- "because she doesn't, and you don't. You pick up crumbs. Does that sting?"

"Sure," he says. "Like gettin pailed by a million jellyfish, go on."

"Oh, good, you get it! Good. Saves me some time." 

Something inside Vriska's burning hotter than Eridan's ever seen. He ungrits his teeth and makes himself lean back, waiting for her to go on. The worst thing he can do to her right now, for making him sit here and take all this shit, is _not_ give her the fight she's looking for.

The rustblood coughs behind them, wheezes -- Eridan knows that sound. Vriska has her brain wrapped around his. She's shut down his respiration. Then she settles, lets the rustblood take a big gasping breath. When they were kids, she would've killed him, easy as thinking. "Long may she reign o'er the stars and the deep," she says, "and what's the next line?"

 _"While down in the waters her great lusus sleeps,"_ Eridan says. "And?"

"Feferi wants to do a little experiment." Vriska picks at the fraying cuffs of her sleeves and adjusts her glasses before going on. "Feferi did a little experiment. To see if Rose could talk to her lusus. You know, the one who'll kill us all if she opens her mouth? That one? So, big surprise, Rose can, and now Feferi's going to hold it over the old witch's head. Like the fate of our whole species is something she can just play with, that _they_ can play with, because she's the Heiress." 

Vriska's searching him for a reaction -- his face, his hands. Any tightening in his shoulders, any sudden tapping of his foot. If he can face down General Ismene in a mood, he can keep his chill here. If Feferi knows what she's doing, it's all gonna be fine, he tells himself. If Rose doesn't lose control of Gl'bgolyb when they put on whatever display they're planning, and it's gonna be a display, he knows the _both_ of them. If the Condesce doesn't decide she's let Feferi live too long and cuts her down where she stands, no matter what Rose tries.

Too many _ifs._

What he says is, "Rose agreed. She glubbin _agreed_ to it." 

"Yeah, what does she have to lose? It's only an entire species that dies if she fails! She destroyed both our universes once, she'd jump at the chance to get to do it again."

"Fuck, an you thought _I_ was a genocidal maniac."

"You were," Vriska says. "You got over it. The chainsaw helped." 

"Just like you used to be a -- "

She rolls her eyes and sighs loudly enough to drown out whatever he was going to say next. "She's not a maniac. Feferi -- she's not. That doesn't mean she's all there on the upper decks!" She _spits_ that, venomous, and he almost opens his mouth on an automatic defense of Fef before she breezes viciously on and he doesn't have the chance. "She's also not listening to me. Or John."

"Think she's gonna listen to me? You think I've got the time to talk Fef and Rose down from this?"

"No," Vriska says. "I just thought you had the right to know. That's all."

"Sharin the responsiblity?"

"If we all die this morning, I want to go out knowing you're as miserable and freaked-out as me! It's the least I can do." With another sigh, this one real, she gets up and puts her coffee cup on the counter. The rustblood snaps out of it and gives her a dazed smile. She probably re-wired something in his brain while she was in there, just for a laugh. "Have a good night," she says, more to the rustblood than to Eridan. 

"Oh," says the rustblood. "Sorry, I wasn't thinking. Anything I can get you" -- one glance at Eridan's rank pips -- "Adjutant?"

Gutterbloods _scramble_ for him. Eridan can get whatever he wants for free, on the house, with nothing but a look and a raised eyebrow. He's got no appetite. What he should do right now, he knows, is march straight on down to Feferi's hivesuite and make her tell him what she's thinking, no intermediaries, no Rose or Vriska or Egbert between them.

He's got the time. He hasn't got the will.

"Nah," he says, "I was just goin."

*

The highest point on the Hiveship is all skylight, a single seamless dome of shieldglass that arcs over Rose's head five trollheights high. It's like standing in the middle of space, only the metal floor beneath one's feet to convince one otherwise -- an assault of stars pressing close from every side. Rose moistens her lips with her tongue. The air is dry, overprocessed, the Hiveship's leavings funnelled up.

"So," Gezlan says, oblivious, her bootheels clicking businesslike and cheerful as she leads them to the center of the deck. "Hellstation Fucknowhere is technically Terraforming Orbital 229-40, floating around -- who cares, that's Vimsha's department, you don't need to know it to mess with Ampora, do you?" 

Dave's hand in hers is warm and dry-palmed, their fingers laced together like they're fairytale children. Instead of breadcrumbs to mark their path, they've got Sellia Gezlan, all-unknowing.

"How many perigees is he gonna be out there?" Dave asks, which saves Rose the trouble of speaking.

"Three, four? Enough time for Ismene to not want to decorate her hivesuite wall with his bulge. That'd be a _tragedy."_ The jab is for Rose, and it does nothing to cut through the knot in her gut.

Right over Gezlan's head, Her Imperious Condescension's warship gleams like an oilslick, its crimson tridents and turrets made miniscule by the distance. Rose pictures the Empress on that warship's observation deck, miniature twin to this one, looking down on the bulk of the hiveship turning slowly beneath her. She imagines that their gazes intersect. 

Dave squeezes her hand, pulling her back into herself. "Thanks," he says, "bringing us up here, it's -- nice." 

Her vision is already going unhinged and dark at the corners. _Not yet,_ she tells the things crawling at the edges of her mind. _Not now. Soon. Wait for me._

"Sure. I used to take Torrin up here all the time when we first got together," Gezlan says. Rose recalls the skinny legislacerator with the cutlery. Novice Torrin Maiyel. Gezlan has peculiar standards for quadrantmates. "But you two," she's saying, "you've been pale for ages, right? You look it."

"Yeah, sure, what's it been -- three sweeps now, Rose?" 

"All your life, Dave."

"C'mon, don't rub it in." 

Gezlan smiles precisely the way their moirail act is supposed to make her smile: indulgent, polite, and filled with a sudden desire to leave them alone to their pile. "Have fun, wigglers," she says.

"We will," Rose says. "And thank you, Sellia, you've been _immeasurably_ helpful."

Gezlan stares at her a moment too long, as if she's noticed something horribly amiss in the angles of the shadows Rose casts. Rose smiles at her. When indigobloods blanch, she notes, their cheeks turn a sort of hollowed-out bluish shade.

"Something you need?" Rose asks.

"No," Gezlan says, all sudden stiff military reserve. "You two just take the elevator down when you're done with your date."

When she's gone down the stairs, Dave says, "She was hitting on you half the way up." 

"Why, yes," Rose says, airily. "She isn't anymore."

He hasn't let go of her hand, and likely won't. "Grubshake bringin' all the trolls to the yard, you ready to do this?" 

"Not until I see Feferi's shuttle dock on Her Condescension's ship," says Rose. "No point in beginning an exercise in mutually assured destruction without having someone to point out who's holding the pin of the grenade. And I hope you're not talking about Eridan."

"Well, I wasn't, but if you wanna talk about it -- y'know, if you're burning up, here."

Rose flicks the sunglasses off of his head, sending them clattering to the floor. "He threatened to put my eyes out."

"And what'd you do to him?" He rubs the bridge of his nose where glasses -- sun- and otherwise -- have worn a groove in. The starlight makes the last faded freckles scattered across his cheeks stand out in bizarre relief. "What'd you do to him _first."_

"I," she says, "may have called him a grasping, loathsome, pathetic, power-hungry murderer." 

"Shit, that's practically hate-second base, don't think I didn't notice that one scarf of yours had a claw tear right down the middle of it -- " 

The gleam of a transport shuttle, like a mobile star, rises from the hiveship and speeds across the view. Two minutes from shuttleport to shuttleport. Ten more, for formality's sake, once Feferi's inside. Dave's fingers are locked around hers. He's watching, too.

"Once I begin," she says, not without difficulty, "you should get out of here."

"Nope, not a chance." 

She turns to him. He takes her gaze straight-on, as if his lack of shades was immaterial. "This isn't your fight, Dave," she says.

"This was never my preoccupation, yeah, you tried that one eight years ago. Didn't work then, not gonna work now." Even as he digs in his heels, the light of the tiny shuttle is being swallowed whole into the maw of the Condesce's warship. The caress of the Furthest Ring at the boundaries of her mind rises, becoming a slow, steady battering, a hailstorm falling over high tide. "Your fight's my fight," he adds.

"Watching you die once," she says, slow enough to cut him with each word, "is as many times as I'd like to watch you die. And I'm not sure that once I let them back in I'll be able to _get them out._ I'm still the pilot they've marked."

"Yeah," Dave says. For a stomach-turning second, she thinks she's convinced him. "Because I'm going to be so much happier if they find you up here and dump you on our doorstep."

"Then cut me down."

"What?"

"If it gets too bad, cut me down. If I hurt you, _cut me down."_ The lines on her palms itch and she tastes ozone, lightning, brine from a boiling sea. At the corners of her vision there is a yawning dark and the Furthest Ring are so _very_ tired of waiting for her. 

Dave's free hand curves around the slope where her shoulder becomes her neck, his bare skin on hers blazingly warm. She shivers. She hadn't realized she was cold. "Sure," he says. "Damn, if I'd known, I would've brought the good sword." _Send you out in style,_ he'd be saying, in some gentler moment. 

They have scant minutes. Dave exhales, and the world around them stretches, smudges about the edges. "Oh," she says, and for just this moment the hissing din of waves in the dark is distant. "If you insist."

He opens his mouth for some terribly clever retort, and they can go in circles all day or she can stand on her toes and hook her arm around the back of his neck to pull him down to her. His mouth opens under hers, an easy tilt of their heads. His hand slides down her spine, presses her to his chest. Rose remembers being horrified, years ago, at how exactly they fit, interlocking precisely, like the gears inside some enormous clock. The first time, he'd dissolved in her hands and she in his, melting in green radiation and then reknitting, _new._ The minute dilates around them, endless, and then breaks like glass.

"Shit, let's do this," he says. 

Rose looks up. The spaces between the stars are black. 

On that crimson warship, Feferi is alone, face-to-face with her Ancestor, four thousand years of malice enfleshed and ruling. Rose has seen pictures of Her Condescension, that tangle of hair and fangs and the glow of tyrian eyeballs; she knows from ancient. She's shared skin with worse things, and will again. Her fingertips flutter over the back of Dave's hand. 

She lets them in.

They're _brackish,_ the things that boil out from between the stars, they smell of seafoam rot and a soft clinging dark; they rise in her like mud. It is a relief. They have ceased to plague her with whispers; why should the Furthest Ring murmur enticements when it is already here? Rose tilts her head back and exhales the last of the Hiveship's thin, dry air, and does not inhale again. Her lungs are sponges, filling slowly with salt, and where she is going she does not need them.

Dave's fingers are still twined close with hers, like vines. She'll keep that feeling. She'll keep that with her, all the way down.

Out amongst the stars, geometry is irrelevant. Non-Euclidean isn't even the half of it. It isn't her body that travels now; she's left that suspended off the deck floor in a greyish swarm of shadows and gone into the black with her mind. With her she takes her _self,_ Seer and pilot, like the drawlight on an anglerfish. She is aiming for large prey. 

Gl'bgolyb is familiar by now, barely comprehensible enormity and a ripple of tentacles; white-on-white, a color that should be lusus-clean and is instead bleached agony. She is very glad to see Rose. Rose knows this because she is not dead, and because she can still think some things that are human, and hers.

One of those things is: _wait for Feferi._

She is not the only mind here at the edge of the perceivable world. There is another, if she cares to reach toward it, larger and older and twined like a ribbon in the vast tentacled mass of Gl'bgolyb. It notices her; she wants it to notice her, a glowing, nagging spark of light where none but the true and eternal Empress of Alternia should be. It notices, and she is drowning.

For a sickening second, Rose sees through her eyes: an ornate throne room, Feferi in the center drawn up proud and defiant, _this impudent whelk's_ confidence no longer inexplicable. 

That thought is not hers, it belongs to the Condesce, and would be a terrifying incursion if Rose had sufficient presence of mind to bother with fear. Fear is a human, mortal thing, and she has left it with her body. There is only the task laid out before her: to be Gl'bgolyb's finest, brightest pawn.

The Condesce turns a fraction more of her attention to Rose, this pebble dropped in the river of her, something to be scooped out with little more effort than a wave tossing bits of wreckage onto the beach. Rose curls into herself just enough to remain where she is, neither advancing nor retreating. The process is nothing but a satisfying challenge. She has been the Furthest Ring's vessel. She has let them see through her eyes. She is a more than worthy opponent for the mere servant of their Emissary.

"My heiress," Her Imperious Condescension says, and Rose feels as if the words are coming out of her own mouth. "What a clever trick. Explain yourself." 

"You want to keep our lusus from speaking," says Feferi. Her Commandant's uniform is a dull, combat-worn black: no decorations pinned to her chest. Nothing to indicate she's any different from a dirty gutterblood but the Tyrian purple of her class symbol and the gills on her neck. "My friend Rose, she'd like to let her talk. I think Gl'bgolyb would have a lot to say, don't you? And the whole universe would listen."

The Condesce considers it. Rose feels her turn it over inside the ancient maze of her mind, a stone rolled around in a mouth. "You would destroy me." 

"And me, and everyone else!" Feferi is very small, and very straight-backed. There are still bandages wrapped around her forearm where the Condesce cut her open the last time she stood in this hall. A hundred more sweeps on the battlefield, and the girl would have managed to scratch her. Five hundred, and perhaps the bout would have lasted a minute. Rose remembers how easily her skin had parted, the slow pump of Tyrian blood in the wound. So strange, to see her own color on the prongs of her trident.

"What," says the Condesce, "is to stop me from having your alien killed in its sleep? And you will tell me now: _my High Command uses her to see the future._ But I tell you, my High Command is becoming spoiled, and will survive without this thing. I say to you: if High Command will not want it killed, what is to stop me from having its higher thought functions stripped out, and having it put to more permanent use? Quite like a helmsman."

"Is that a risk you're willing to take? There's failsafes," Feferi says. "Tripwires, built into her brain! I have a lot of really clever psionics. And so do you, I bet." 

She is a valve, or a machine, or a bomb. The living pin of the grenade. But she is also -- she _recalls_ that she is Rose Lalonde, and shies away: she has been a god, and is now a grimmer thing, but she is only ten sweeps -- _twenty-one years_ \-- old, and mortality is heir to her flesh. She feels the Condesce reach for her mind -- reach for it to turn it inside-out, so long as it is vulnerable, and see these alleged failsafes for herself. 

Gl'bgolyb refuses her. Gl'bgolyb seizes them both and shunts them apart. The Rift's Carbuncle will not be a battleground, and Rose feels this fact in every cell and atom of her being; even Her Imperious Condescension bends the knee to her lusus in some silent corner of her mind. Rose _thrills_ to it. She is made of the absence of starlight and her bones are wires on the edge of singing: in this moment all she needs to do is say _yes,_ say _now,_ and Gl'bgolyb will help her end another universe.

"Enough." The Condesce pounds her trident on the dais. "Deliver your message, little sister."

Feferi clasps her hands behind her back, prim as a new recruit. "I want you to leave me alone," she says. "I want you to leave me and mine alone, so we can play our game _right._ Or else -- a universe without us can't possibly be worse than one with us, can it be? So go back to the stars, elder sister, and conquer some more worlds. I'll come to you when I'm ready." 

"And destroy me?"

"And destroy you."

The words have the sound of ritual about them. Rose catches a spark of alarming joy from the Condesce's mind: excitement in a being that has not known excitement since she rose from the waters to kill her first landdweller, hair pooling about her ankles and dragging in the filthy sands. Then she pulls free of her.

Her body is a distant husk, a faint pull that she has to claw her way back towards. There are aeons between her and it, and Gl'bgolyb (and others -- Gl'bgolyb is the very _least of them_ \-- ) follows her progress, patient. Her flesh is after all just flesh, and hardly hers: it is host and harbor now, and there is little difference between Rose within it and Rose without. Somewhere in the writhing mass of her she can feel Dave still holding onto what was once her hand.

 _Rose,_ Gl'bgolyb whispers to her. _Rose, we have kept you safe._

It is true.

 _You have made promises,_ Gl'bgolyb says. _You have made offers._

This is true as well. The other, larger horrors crowd at the corners of what Rose can perceive, clamor for entry.

_Little emissary, little pilot. We will sing for you, as you have asked of us. As you were meant to ask of us._

No, Rose thinks. Not this time. Not now.

They laugh like the popping of bubbles in tar. _What will you give us for waiting? What can you offer for our patience? We have been so patient, Rose._

She thinks first of giving them herself, and then that she cannot offer a gift already-promised, even if she is willing. They would take her, they would claim and transform her, and she would not suffice. They would begin -- _she_ would begin with Dave. Reach out, wrap him close like he'd held her, a grimdark band across his neck, around his chest, his belly; humans are fragile, even humans who are gods. He would go to pulp. His eyes -- his eyes would pop, wash down his cheekbones, and she would leave him there, staring up at the stars. There is a Hiveship more, beneath. What she would become would hunger. Terezi's tongue, ripped from her mouth. John's throat, torn open in a bubble of blood. Eridan, she'd reach into the gills on his sides and twine her fingers in the loops of intestine, dress a room in black bile for the sake of sentiment -- and then the rest of the ship, troll by troll, one by one.

She _cannot._ She would scream if it was possible to scream.

Instead, she says, desperately: _I offer you a deferral, and a sweeter prize._

 _What could be sweeter than you?_ they tell her, mother-soft.

 _There is a revolution coming,_ Rose says. It is not enough; she specifies in frantic search, something to exchange for the Vast Glub unvoiced. _You may feast on the dead and the dying. And when we are done with her, you may have the Empress of All Alternia; she has run from you for four thousand sweeps, and I will bring her back._

There is a consideration and a measuring.

 _Yes,_ says the Furthest Ring. 

They drop her back into herself. It's only a moment's fall, and she opens her eyes as though from a particularly restful sleep, simple as rolling over in bed. Her mind does not collapse under the strain of what she has seen. She chooses to interpret it as a kindness. The Furthest Ring is perhaps gracious to its servants; it would not destroy a willing tool, let alone an _eager_ one.

"Morning, princess," Dave says, around chattering teeth. Her ears are too sensitive to the sound of it, even as she struggles to focus on his white, strained face. "Nice of you to join the class."

"Hi," Rose says. The words come out in English. She expected _ia ia cthulhu fhtagn,_ and instead she's got inanity.

"So I'm gonna fall over in like two seconds." Dave's grip on her wrist ought to be painful. She does not feel very much at all. "You cool with that?" 

"Your maidenly distress," she begins, only to be forced to throw herself at him, haul him up right, lest they crash to the ground. Dave's arm is a mess of mottled bruises. They disappear up under his tee-shirt, and when she puts her hand on his chest, right over his heart, he winces. 

"Ain't nothing maidenly about this." He isn't in her lap and she isn't in his. They're a precarious, leaning tangle, which suits her just fine. She can feel him breathe. She tries to breathe in time.

"Was it _that_ bad?" she asks. She isn't sure she wants to know. On the ground, to the right, are Dave's shades. The lenses are shattered, the frames twisted in on themselves. Rose pictures what would have become of his eyes if he'd still been wearing them, and drops her forehead onto his shoulder.

"Nah, no big," Dave says, "just spent the last two hours up to my shoulder in your quaking eldtritch horrorjuice."

"I did warn you, you know."

"Yeah, fuck that," he says. He hardly has the strength to crush her to him. At some point, he must have despaired of her return, holding what he thought may have been a hand while she'd dissolved into a pool of grimdarkness. "Did you win?"

 _I sold the dead of Alternia for the price of a song, to save my hide._ "I'm here, aren't I?"

"Good enough for me."

Above them, the stars wheel endlessly. She does not want to see them; she finds his mouth with hers instead. He lifts a hand to her hair, smoothes it down the nape of her neck.


End file.
